Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2001 11:59:35 -0500 (EST) From: "Lawrence S. Lansing" <lansil@rpi.edu> To: Rick Bischoff <bischoff@rickjr.org> Cc: stable-digest <stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: S2460 problems Message-ID: <Pine.A41.3.96.1011219113918.48270A-100000@vcmr-19.rcs.rpi.edu> In-Reply-To: <1781377234.20011219092142@rickjr.org>
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> I have a S2460 Tyan Tiger motherboard <snip> > However, when I installed FreeBSD onto either drive, the entire > system hard locks at random times. <snip> I experienced similar problems with my system. I'm running a Tyan S2462 motherboard, dual 1200 MHz MP athlons, 1 gig of reg. ecc RAM, SB Live value, Nvidia TNT2 Ultra, on-board dual-channel SCSI, on-board video. I believe I'm still running tyan's original BIOS release...and definitely not the latest, at any rate. The symptoms for me: the system would lock up *when idle*. Generally, I'd walk away from my computer for a minute, and I would come back to see the console screen-saver frozen. No amount of coaxing would revive the system. No kernel-panic or other useful error information. I experienced these symptoms from the time I built my system (4.3-stable, maybe 4.3-release) to 4.4-release. Somewhere along the 4.4-stable branch, the problem was apparently fixed, and my machine is now rock-solid, after a build/installworld. When I say the system locked up "when idle", I mean that I was able to keep the system from crashing by maintaining a CPU load. With bash, I would do something like : "cat </dev/zero >/dev/null&;cat </dev/zero >/dev/null&" The resulting two processes would keep both CPUs occupied...and the machine would be perfectly stable, even when left in this state for hours on end. I was able to build/installworld on the system to upgrade, without any stability problems. Another reliable way to prevent the crashes was to disable SMP in the kernel. With a uniprocessor kernel, the lockups *did not happen*. At first I suspected a hardware issue. I yanked most of my hardware, with the exception of the video card. I know the soundcard was not the problem. The only thing I did not pull (and should have) was the video card. In short, if you're not running the latest 4.4-stable, I suggest you upgrade. I would be interested in hearing if maintaining a load on the system (or using a uniprocessor kernel) keeps the machine from crashing--it would give me peace of mind to know that I am not suffering from any hardware problems. I hope this helps. -Larry Lansing To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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