*BSD News Article 39726


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From: CHADA@CenSoft.COM (Chad Attermann)
Subject: FreeBSD 2.0R Install & HD problems
Keywords: freebsd 2.0R install
Message-ID: <CHADA.2.2EF5B8C3@CenSoft.COM>
Sender: usenet@indirect.com (System Operator)
Organization: Century Software, Inc.
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 16:45:56 GMT
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Lines: 69

Let me say first off that the 2.0 release of FreeBSD is amazing!  The FreeBSD 
team has done a excellent job!  I got a hold of the first set of 2.0R install 
disks, and installed it on my DX2/66 machine.  Everything works great and I'm 
very pleased with my knew system.  In fact I like it so much that I wanted to 
put a small FreeBSD partition on my machine at work.  It has (don't 
laugh) a Cyrix 386DX/40 processor.  These are the problems I've been having.  
Hopefully someone has found a solution, because I've tried everything I know:

The biggest problem is when installing from an older 2.0R install set (not 
sure of date), the kernel appears to probe for a device pci0.  I am no expert 
at *BSD, so I have know idea what this could be, but I do know that I could 
not find it to disable it in the kernel config utility.  Anyway my machine 
would hang upon probing for this device.  Here is exactly what it displayed:
     pci0: scanning device 0..15, mechanism=2.
     pci0:2: vendor=0x3fff, device=0xffff [not supported]
     pci0:3: vendor=0xb421, device=0x4f59, class=old [not supported]
The hardware on my machine is a 1meg video card (Sigma?), an NE2000 clone, a 
mono video card (tried removing this) and an IDE disk controller.  Anyway, I 
got ahold of a later install set that alleviated this problem (941204 set).  I 
still get it sometimes though when I run fixit from sysinstall, and it 
replaces my kernel.

Okay, once I got around that problem, I got through the installation to FTPing 
the bindist from a machine on my local subnet.  I did all of the configuration 
for my NE2000 card at 0x300 int 5.  I've done this many times so I know I have 
all of the host, gateway, netmask, etc info correct.  I entered the IP 
address of the local machine with the bindist on it, and it connected.  I gave 
it my username and password, I got the message saying I was logged in, and 
then nothing, no more response from the machine.  I have tried every way I can 
think of, configuring the network from sysinstall, configuring it manually 
from the shell, everything, but I can never get past the login.  I know that 
the FTP server is working fine.  Name serve is not working either.  I 
can ping anyone on my subnet thoughwith an IP address.  Any ideas?

Well, those are the install problems I'm having.  I put off posting these here 
until I had tried everything.  I haven't been able to find any of this in the 
install notes, or any FAQs.  Now my 486DX2/66 machine is running 2.0R fine.  
The only greivance that I have with it is that I cannot get sysinstall to 
recognize my second disk.  I am using an IDE controller with a Samsung 203MB 
and a Seagate 130MB as the slave drive.  The installation can recognize either 
of them separately, but when I have them both configured, install only sees 
the Samsung.  I even went as far as to connect only the Seagate, and ran the 
install and configured a FreeBSD partition on it.  Then I reconnected the 
Samsung, and sysinstall cannot see the Seagate still.  What I really want is 
to put some swap on my Seagate, which leads me to my final question.

When running XFree86 3.1, I cannot seem to put much of a load on it at all 
with out it hanging on me.  My 486DX2/66 machine has 8 MB of ram, and 16 MB 
of swap, as per the install notes.  When running apps, for instance xv, I 
have initially used about 67% of swap, and after running it jumps up to 70% 
give or take.  Anyway, pulling up a large GIF kills it, and sometimes hangs my 
system.  Pulling up a small GIF eats some more swap, but what is odd is after 
exiting from xv, not much swap is freed up.  This is probably normal 
because the shared libraries stay in swap until there is a demand.  But, if I 
keep running xv, exiting, and running it again, I eventually run out of swap 
after about the fourth time.  I don't much about swap_pager, but it seems like 
I am leaking swap memory somewhere.  Is the only solution to add more swap 
space?  Or more physical memory?  Or both???

I apologize for the lengthiness of this post.  I thought I'd queue up all the 
problems first, and only post once.  Thanks in advance for any help.  Great 
job again to the FreeBSD Team.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chad Attermann
Century Software, R&D
Email: CHADA@CenSoft.COM
           *** All opinions expressed are my own, and do not necessarily ***
                                 *** reflect those of my employer ***