*BSD News Article 54460


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Am I having Mother Board problems? (long)
Date: 12 Nov 1995 23:50:38 +0100
Organization: Private FreeBSD site, Dresden.
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Mike R. Prevost <mprevost@ro.com> wrote:

>... but it ALWAYS hangs during boot.  It hangs right 
>after is says 'probing for devices on ISA bus' (or whatever).  However, 
>it ALWAYS will do fine if I either 1) type '-v' and the boot: prompt, or 
>2) type '-c' at the boot: prompt and immediatley type 'quit' at the 
>config prompt.

This _could_ be related to the keyboard probe in syscons.  It's
happening right after this message (i know it since a box without a
keyboard connected got entirely stuck in 2.0.5, i hope Søren has been
fixing this meanwhile).

Just as a simple test: can you try configuring a kernel with pcvt and
try this?  It might help isolating the problem.

>When I first install FreeBSD (2.0.5) I had problems with processes dying
>from signal 11 errors.  I also had files that would somehow get typos in
>them without my intervention.

This sounds like memory (or cache) problems.

FreeBSD seems to stress memory much more than other systems, in
particular, it's a much better memory test program than anything you
could run under DOS. :-)

>So I got brave and installed a 2.1.0 snapshot (11??95).  It was working 
>ok, but processes started dying from (of all things)  SIG_BUS errors.  I 
>have very frequent kernel "panics" becauseof kernel page faults.  I even 
>saw an "privileged instruction" fault.  (these were from trap() evidently).

Either try relaxing the memory timing.  Or even worse, i remember
somebody who had problems with some non-Intel CPUs, causing him great
grief with ``privileged instruction'' faults.  Replacing the CPU
worked.  I hope the best for you that it's _not_ your CPU.
-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)