*BSD News Article 14559


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From: zh@news.uni-konstanz.de (Z. Horvat)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Cache testing software.
Message-ID: <1993Apr16.065919.103320@eratu.rz.uni-konstanz.de>
Date: 16 Apr 93 06:59:19 GMT
References: <1993Apr15.154147.10556@cm.cf.ac.uk>
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Organization: RZ Universitaet Konstanz
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Paul (paul@isl.cf.ac.uk) wrote:
: Basically, does any exist and where can I get it?

: It looks like what I thought was an incorrect jumper was correct after
: all. So, now I want to test all the chips before I give up and assume
: I've got one of those braindead boards that doesn't do DMA properly. I
: don't suppose there's some way of testing this out is there? (The DMA
: problem that is -- it would be very useful to be able to walk into a
: shop, stick in a disk and find out whether the cache is going to work
: properly with 386bsd)

I have just made the experience that loading the Tiny386BSD disk 
(and even doing an install from it) does not prove that the machine
will run 386BSD fine. I was in the process of buying a new machine
and wanted to make sure that it 386BSD would work on it. The people
from the nearby computer store allowed me to bring along a 386BSD
boot disk and play with the machine. So far everything went fine so
i decided to buy it. 
Later i installed the whole bin and src distribution and the trouble 
started : Files suddenly corrupted, spurious hangs, etc etc.
I noticed that turning the external cache off removed the problem, 
of course giving a performance degrade.
Fortunately, the people which sold me the PC were smart enough to
exchange the motherboard for me and the problem went away.
The told me that they gave my "old" board to someone who is now
successfully running OS2 on it.
This sounds strange to me, as i would have expected that one would
not even be able to run DOS software properly on such a board.



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