*BSD News Article 10136


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From: ujlh@pool.info.sunyit.edu (James Henrickson)
Subject: Re: [386BSD] error: NMI port 61 b0, port 70 ff
Message-ID: <1993Jan20.002740.6027@pool.info.sunyit.edu>
Organization: State University of New York -- Institute of Technology
References: <jeremy.727348356@scorpion.ac.cowan.edu.au> <1993Jan19.064023.27995@citec.oz.au>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1993 00:27:40 GMT
Lines: 32

In article <1993Jan19.064023.27995@citec.oz.au> sgccseh@citec.oz.au (Steve Hocking) writes:
>j.laidman@cowan.edu.au (Jeremy Laidman) writes:
>
>>Any ideas on this error?  I'm working away and from time to time I get the
>>following sort of thing on my screen:
>>	NMI port 61 b0, port 70 ff
>>Everything seems to work OK.  I'm just worried that there might be some damage
>>taking place that I don't know about.
>
>	I used to get this exact same error here at work. It turned out that
>some bozo had installed 100ns simms in my machine for the upper 4Mb of mem
>when it was originally supposed have 80ns or better simms. Basically it is
>just low level memory errors. If you have programs crashing from time to
>time then this is probably the cause too.
>

I have an NE2000 clone set for IRQ2 and I didn't get these messages
until I replaced my SVGA card with an old monochrome video card.  In 
my case, I believe it is either (1) that my video card is too slow (it
wouldn't work at all on a motherboard with a faster I/O bus), or
(2) that the video card uses IRQ2.  This system doesn't run full time,
and I usually get the 'NMI' messages only once or twice a day.  I
sometimes get the messages if I have heavy Ethernet activity, but it
isn't often enough to be predictable.

I think the FAQ recommends moving the NE2000 to a different IRQ.  I
haven't noticed any other problems (I've had this configuration since
August) and prefer to keep all of my computers configured the same, so 
I'll just ignore the messages until I get another video card. 

Just figured I'd shed some additional light on the 'NMI' situation.