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Date:      Mon, 08 Oct 2001 17:55:02 -0700
From:      Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>
To:        Bob Willcox <bob@immure.com>
Cc:        Luuk van Dijk <lvd@mndmttr.nl>, freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Advice on Tyan dual athlon board wanted 
Message-ID:  <20011009005502.A148F380F@overcee.netplex.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <20011008144158.B55077@luke.immure.com> 

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Bob Willcox wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2001 at 08:49:52PM +0200, Luuk van Dijk wrote:
> > I have the opportunity to buy a Tyan Tiger dual athlon motherboard
> > for about 400 euro, and could use some advice.
> > 
> >     - does FreeBSD run on this?  (I've seen messages confirming that
> > FreeBSD
> > runs on its elder brother, the ThunderK7)
> 
> I am running FreeBSD 4-stable on one with two 1.2 GHz MP (Palomino)
> Athlons and 1GB of memory.

Likewise, both under 4.x and 5.x.

> > 
> >     - are there things to watch out for?
> 
> Nothing specific that I can think of, off-hand. Mine came up quite
> easily. I did originally have a hardware problem trying to run with two
> 512MB Reg ECC DIMMs. The MB would not boot (never got past BIOS stuff to
> try FreeBSD). I wound up switching to four 256MB Reg ECC DIMMs and all
> was well (except that I won't be able to add more memory:-().

Also, be sure to update to the latest bios from tyan.  v2.06 is the
absolute earliest you should use, and preferably v2.07a.

> Note that if you turn on ECC in the BIOS settings that the boot time
> increases noticably. There will be significant pause (almost a minute in
> my case) before the first display and POST beep occurs...so give it some
> time. :-)

I *strongly* recommend that you change it back on again and just put up
with the delay.  Set it to 'ECC Scrub" and '#SERR on multiple bit errors'.
If you dont to this, then you can end up chasing your tail wondering why
the machine crashed due to something silly that "cannot happen" that was 
really an undetected/unreported memory error.

If you dont turn it on, then the ECC feature of the ram is 100% useless.
And on a new memory technology (DDR), you should use all the seatbelts that
are available.

Cheers,
-Peter
--
Peter Wemm - peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com; peter@netplex.com.au
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5


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