In article <101887281.20021125081533@mku.hu>
hajdu.zoltan@mku.hu wrote:

> On 2002. 11. 24., Dr R.S. Brooks has wisely spoken:
> 
> > So is anyone running 1.6 successfully on an EISA-based machine?  I realise
> > these machines are a bit ancient, but there are a lot of them available, and
> > they seem ideal for a home fileserver.
> 
> An 1.6 NetBSD is running fine on an IBM PC Server 520 with a similar
> motherboard (PCI/EISA, dual p133, intel chipset). I use the GENERIC
> kernel though, since compiling a custom one takes ages on this
> hardware. But this detects the proper size of the memory on board.

Maybe some Compaq machines have some quirk in their BIOS.
OpenBSD seems to have the same problem:
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/arch/i386/stand/libsa/biosprobe.c

Our sys/arch/i386/stand/lib/biosmem.S uses int 0x15 function 0x88, but
FreeBSD also tries int 0x15 function 0xe820 and int 0x15 function 0xe801:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosmem.c
I don't know about i386 BIOS, but they might help.
--
Izumi Tsutsui
tsutsui@ceres.dti.ne.jp