On Sat, Jun 16, 2001 at 10:21:02PM -0700, Gerald C. Simmons wrote:
> I have an Amptron PM8900 Motherboard using the Intel 430VX Chipset with a
> 100MHz AMD K5 processor and 32MB of SDRAM.
> 
> Has anyone seen problems with this setup before?
> Any known issues with NetBSD and the AMD K5 processor?
> 
> I have been hunting down weird rebooting and Bus Error problems seemingly
> caused by this board. I finally just swapped the board out with a known working
> Pentium 200 Board / 440BX Chipset / 128MB RAM. Magically, all my problems went
> away.
> 
> The system ran through memory diagnostics perfectly, cache checked out, passed
> all other diagnostics. It has been seemingly "stable" running NetBSD-1.4.2 for
> at least two months, with only an occasional unexplained kernel crash. (I
> tried NetBSD-1.5, but it crashed very consisantly with high disk I/O. Should
> have been my first clue.) It would even completely compile a new kernel
> without incident. However, compiling much of anything under pkgsrc would
> randomly pop up a Bus Error / Core Dump.
> 
> Smells to me like maybe a DMA timing problem?

No, you'd see corrupted data at various place, including filesystem
related panics.

> 
> I guess I'm looking for any other people's experiences with this Chipset /
> Processor. Should I suspect the Processor (AMD K5,) the board, or the memory??

At first, try to turn off caches.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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