*BSD News Article 70080


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From: mckinley@spss.com (Rob McKinley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: 2.1/2.2SNAP and Triton II motherboards?
Date: Mon, 03 Jun 1996 22:13:27 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Lines: 44
Message-ID: <31b362a4.278236558@news.spss.com>
References: <31ade421.1055104@news.spss.com> <31B0557A.185@www.play-hookey.com>
Reply-To: mckinley@spss.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: mckinley.spss.com
X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99e/32.227

Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> wrote:

>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
>> 
[snip]
>> 
>
>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
Ken,

Thanks for the tip.  Following another thread, I've given up mounting
the DOS partitions (all VFAT) to see if that improves things.  So far,
so good.  1 complete kernel build, and several hours trying to get
userPPP to connect to work (thru a Telebit Netblazer - no success, alas)
and no self destructing filesystems. :-) 

Rob

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  Rob McKinley		   !  Interim Release:
  SPSS Inc. 		   !	 A programmer's feeble attempt at repentance.
  312-329-3661		   !
  mckinley@spss.com    !
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