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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!hamblin.math.byu.edu!news.byu.edu!ux1!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry 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. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I have an 8 user poetic license" - me Get the 386bsd FAQ from agate.berkeley.edu:/pub/386BSD/386bsd-0.1/unofficial -------------------------------------------------------------------------------