Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 00:06:47 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Walnut Creek, Where Are You? Message-ID: <4.1.19990217234718.0401de40@mail.lariat.org> In-Reply-To: <199902180609.WAA03463@dingo.cdrom.com> References: <Your message of "Wed, 17 Feb 1999 23:06:37 MST." <4.1.19990217225925.0401f9d0@mail.lariat.org>
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At 10:09 PM 2/17/99 -0800, Mike Smith wrote: >Brett, I take back everything I said about offering you hardware to >write drivers with. If you're that far behind the ball with the way >that PCI works, it wouldn't be even vaguely economical. It has nothing to do with PCI. A probe for something else ENTIRELY could be mucking things up. No, it's not "supposed" to happen, but it does. Take it from an EE who's designed chips and motherboards: a VGA driver or a sound card driver can mess up the works in subtle ways. Heck, you might even find that the machine never hangs when booted with, say, a serial console and no video card. >Just accept that courtesy of the marvels of modern PnP architectures, >what you are fretting about is effectively impossible. There's a reason why they call it "Plug 'n Pray." Scans for various sorts of legacy hardware *can* mess up a motherboard. And IBM's motherboards are sometimes weird. This is why one of the first things you should try -- if you haven't already -- is disabling nonessential, seemingly unrelated drivers in the kernel. If you're lucky, you'll find that removing one of them mysteriously makes the problem go away. If you're not, you'll have to check for other problems such as race conditions, etc. I'd have to observe the problem occurring, and perhaps single-step the machine through the problem code while looking at the spec sheet, to develop other ideas. --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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