*BSD News Article 69919


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From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: 2.1/2.2SNAP and Triton II motherboards?
Date: Sat, 01 Jun 1996 07:36:42 -0700
Organization: Erols Internet Services
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Rob McKinley wrote:
> 
> I'm the proud owner of a Tyan Tomcat Pentium/PCI motherboard with the
> Triton II chipset.  I've tried several installations of 2.1R and the May
> 
> 2.2SNAP and ended up with the same mess.  After a short period of time
> ~2 hours of uptime, the filesystems get corrupted.  Usually, the first
> 
> indications are load failures of programs that ran "just a few minutes
> 
> ago", due to a bad signature of the C runtime shared lib.  If you
> shutdown and reboot, the auto fsck bombs trying to put it all back
> together.  It complains at boot about an unknown PCI bridge(?) id. It
> does find the adaptec 2940 on the PCI bus and the CDROM and tape drive
> on the SCSI chain.  FreeBSD itself is installed on an IDE drive (wd0)
> and  /usr is hung off on another IDE drive. It's got 32 meg of memory on
> it, and the typical (Win95|WinNT|OS/2) all work fine...  Suggestions
> welcome.
> 
> Rob
> 
> P.S.  I'm getting good at the install program :-)
> 

I've mentioned this problem before, which I've had with a number of 
motherboards, and I've learned a bit since then. Check the ROM BIOS 
settings for your cache RAM. If it accesses too fast, FreeBSD has big 
problems. In some cases I couldn't even install correctly; the Alt-F2 
display would show large blocks of data even in the bin files to have 
been dropped as junk.

My immediate solution was to disable the cache, which worked but meant no 
cache. Now, I have found that if I force slower cache access and perhaps 
insert a wait state for writing, it works OK.

I don't know if this is the cause of your problem, but your symptoms sure 
sound familiar!

Ken