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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: Occasional system hangs
Message-ID: <1992Dec14.175811.8493@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <andrewh.724059111@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au> <1gaclpINN84v@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> <1992Dec11.142822.6314@crash>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 92 17:58:11 GMT
Lines: 37
In article <1992Dec11.142822.6314@crash> fpm@crash.cts.com (Frank Maclachlan) writes:
>> I don't think more RAM will help. I have 32M of RAM and and 32M swap
>>partition. It still hangs. nroff is the usual culprit for me.
>
>I had the same problem. My system system would lock up completely from
>time to time. Nroff seemed to be particularly troublesome. I resolved
>it by removing my ULSI 80387 fpu. You can see if this is the problem
>by modifying npxprobe() in '/sys/i386/isa/npx.c' to not find the fpu
>and return 0. This causes the fpu to be ignored.
Is there a reliable way to identify this particular chip? With the number
of problems reported, it would seem worthwhile to identify FPU type, and
emulate only those instructions not supported. This would allow the poor
people stuck with the chip to derive some benefit from it, as well as
not requiring major surgery to get a machine with one booted and a kernel
set up to ignore the FPU before another surgical procedure to reinsert it.
Another useful approach (that would require full acceptance of Julians
boot blocks -- as in replacing the wdboot code as well) would be to
allow "arguments" on boot to the kernel, like "NOFPU" and "10BITIO" for
people with bad FPU's or single sigma 386's. Of course this would also
require the ability to put these flags in a file somewhere so the
kernel could have them "on" by default.
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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