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From: michaelv@iastate.edu (Michael L. VanLoon)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: FreeBSD died on P560 with 32megs ram
Date: 22 Mar 94 16:47:32 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
Lines: 33
Message-ID: <michaelv.764354852@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
References: <1994Mar17.095541.29513@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl> <MARK.876.2D87ACA4@ardsley.business.uwo.ca> <2mlb4o$sfh@news.ysu.edu> <ZQ+sgD2.dysonj@delphi.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ponderous.cc.iastate.edu
In <ZQ+sgD2.dysonj@delphi.com> John Dyson <dysonj@delphi.com> writes:
>Christopher L. Mikkelson <ap713@yfn.ysu.edu> writes:
>
>>Is this something new in FreeBSD? My dad had 386BSD 0.1 on a machine with a
>>1542C and 24MB of RAM without any trouble. He currently has (dare I say it)
>>Linux running on the same machine without trouble. Would NetBSD support
>>>16MB?
>I don't think that *BSD has any support for ISA & bus mastering DMA > 16MB
>yet. FreeBSD will probably have it in V1.2. It is curious that
>386BSD 0.1 works > 16MB, maybe the buffers were all pre-allocated at
>startup (I think that NetBSD does this) and he just did not happen to
>use the swap-pager above 16MB???
This is probably exactly what is happening. With 24meg of RAM, he's
almost surely not paging/swapping. You'd have to push your machine
pretty hard with X running to get it to start paging in 24meg. Rest
assured that if he *does* start to get the machine swapping, he *WILL*
crash.
NetBSD does not yet support bounce buffers to the lower 16meg. In
your case it would work until you started swapping. A better
solution, though, is to get a 32-bit SCSI controller (either EISA,
VLB, or PCI bus [I don't know if anyone yet has run a PCI bus
controller to verify that they work without ugly hacks]).
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Michael L. VanLoon Iowa State University Computation Center
michaelv@iastate.edu Project Vincent Systems Staff
Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free Un*x for PC/Mac/Amiga/etc.
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