*BSD News Article 53073


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From: pete@inquo.net (Pete Kruckenberg)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Memory upgrade problems w/ 2.0.5R
Date: 14 Oct 1995 18:44:14 GMT
Organization: inQuo Internet (801) 530-7160
Lines: 50
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <45p0du$li5@xymox.dsw.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: inquo.net
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

Last night, I attempted to upgrade my FreeBSD 2.0.5R news/Web server from 
64 to 96MB. It ended in slight disaster. I wanted to find out if I missed 
something critical, or if one or both of my SIMMs might have been bad.

Here's what I did:

 modified my conf file with 'options MEMMAX="98304"', then rebuilt the 
  kernel
 when building the kernel, I use optimizations (gcc 2.6.3): 
              -O2 -m486 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe

The system is a Pentium 75 (AMI BIOS, I think) with an Adaptec 2940 PCI 
controller, VGA controller, 2 SCSI (Barracuda) 4GB drives.

After I installed the new kernel, things came up just fine, but after
maybe 10-20 minutes, the machine would crash and reboot, with a message
like: 

 /kernel: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
 /kernel: fault virtual address    = 0xf1a6a814
 /kernel: fault code               = supervisor read, page not present
 /kernel: instruction pointer      = 0x8:0xf019e735
 /kernel: code segment             = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
 /kernel:                  = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
 /kernel: processor eflags = interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
 /kernel: current process          = 670 (innd)
 /kernel: interrupt mask           =
 /kernel: panic: page fault
 /kernel:
 /kernel: syncing disks... 53 53 48 39 27 10 done
 /kernel: Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - press a key on the console to abort
 /kernel: Rebooting...

This happened a couple other times with the current process = Idle, but 
those times, the disks didn't sync (I just got timeouts), so there was no 
record in /var/log/messages.

So, would this indicate a hardware problem, or a software problem, or
what? I'm a little hesitant to try this again until I know how to avoid
it. As soon as 2.1 comes out, I'll probably upgrade the OS, but I would
like to bump it up to 96MB now, if possible. 

Thanks for your input.
Pete Kruckenberg
pete@inquo.net