*BSD News Article 4072


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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uniwa!cujo!marsh!cproto
From: cproto@marsh.cs.curtin.edu.au (Computer Protocol)
Subject: Re: NMI probs and messages.
Message-ID: <cproto.714656525@marsh>
Sender: news@cujo.curtin.edu.au (News Manager)
Organization: Curtin University of Technology
References: <1992Aug22.151608.19404@ponds.uucp>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1992 11:42:05 GMT
Lines: 46

rivers@ponds.uucp (Thomas David Rivers) writes:



> I sometimes notice the following message in /var/log/messages:

>Aug 21 21:55:15 puddles /386bsd: NMI port 61 a0, port 70 ff

> can anybody tell me what this means?  It doesn't seem to cause any
> problems.   Initially, I thought it was related to the math coprocessor, 
> but I have hacked the probe function in npx.c to ignore mine.

> It seems to occur right at startup, never during (sometimes many days)
> when the machine is running, and certainly not consistently.

> Also, I seem to sometimes get empty messages, as in:

>Aug 21 21:55:15 puddles /386bsd:

> which appear on my console screen as well, so if you run into a 
> message producing call that has some funny parameters, let me know.  

>       - Thanks -
>     - Dave Rivers -
>     (rivers@ponds.uucp)

I too got the NMI message several times while I was building X11R5. The
message was somehow associated with a segmentation violation which
happened at the same time (in cpp). I rebooted and the problem went
away. Once I had the problem without any other sign (i.e. segmentation
violation). I had a look at the reported port values. Port 61 is a
system control port and bit 8 indicated a parity error. Port 70 is the
NMI mask register and a value of 0 indicates NMI enabled (if my memory
is right). My diagnostic software claims my RAM is o.k. Also DOS Windows
3.1 runs just fine. Any ideas anybody. I think it could be some corrupt
page table entry ???

Regards - Tibor Sashegyi (cproto@abel.cs.curtin.edu.au)

P.S. I had the following values:

port 61 a0, port 70 ff
port 61 b0, port 70 00
port 61 a0, port 70 00