On 29 Mar 1996, Charles M. Hannum wrote:

> 
> Chad Mynhier <mynhier@cs.utk.edu> writes:
> 
> > segmentation faults from vi, man, less, getty, and login.  I've 
> > read that this is indicative of bad memory, so I returned the 
> > memory.  I received replacements and got the same behavior.
> 
> It would help if you detailed what's in the machine.
> 
> One thing that may be related is that some 486 motherboards are known
> to not handle caching above 16MB correctly.

  That is true. It is true if:

  1) The MB has only ISA slots
  2) Has 30-pin Simm slots as well as 72-pin

  This is not true if:

  1) The MB has EISA or PCI slots. Also true for some VLB boards
  2) If the procesors is a Pentium.

  This BTW also happens in Novell Netware. Apparently pure ISA
  boards cannot cache their RAM above 16 MB because of the
  limitations of ISA H/W. You can tell the board to specially
  handle this (at least for Novell) but some people have reported
  that performance on purely ISA boards actually SLOWS DOWN
  when they add memory and run Linux, etc.

  Some VLB boards are cheap and do not fix this problem. Some
  boards with both 30-pin and 72-pin Simms do not fix this
  problem. Sorry if this is a crappy explanation of H/W....

  This is probably NOT a problem with Penitum MB nor with
  boards that support more than 256K cache, nor with boards
  that have ONLY 72-pin Simms slots. Reason ? Somebody was
  smart and spent $2.50 more to put in better BIOS and
  better PCB for their MB.

> 
>