Mario Sergio Fujikawa Ferreira
2003-Apr-08 10:55 UTC
Panic asus a7m266 with 2 512Mb PC2400 DDR333 memory
Hi, Last thursday, I installed (20/Mar/2003) 2 kingston valueram 512Mb PC2400 DDR333 (KVR333X64C25/512) sticks on my A7M266 running up to date -STABLE. The system became unstable right after installation, any form of system load triggered a kernel panic: "Page Fault While In Kernel Mode". My main test was the usual 'make buildworld'. I became worried about the quality of the memory sticks. Therefore, I ran several forms of tests/benchmarks. memtest86 (http://www.memtest86.com/) worked right after running all tests for 16 hours. prime95 (http://www.mersenne.org/) crunch test which used about 900Mb of memory worked fine under Windows after 8 hours or so. Then, I ran Sisandra 2003 burn-in test for about 4 hours. Finally, I ran DocMemory 2.0 for 6 hours. All of them worked without any glitches. No problems were found with the system. This small test battery got me wondering if this was not somewhat related to some interaction between FreeBSD and the memory sticks. I did several tests for days, 1) tried very conservative bios settings (CAS 3T, etc) 2) tried only 1 memory stick at a time on memory bay 1 3) tried only 1 memory stick at a time on memory bay 2 4) tried combination of all memory bios settings (took 5 days) 5) tried increasing voltage supply of both chipset, memory and processor, several combinations Windows is always fine with any of these settings. However, FreeBSD was not happy with any. Then, I wondered if changing any kernel build settings would make any difference. I changed a single line from maxusers 0 to maxusers 256 this made the system a lot more stable. I was able to use the machine for several hours. It even survived 2 'make buildworld' but it panics at the end nevertheless. One thing of interest, whenever the system panics, the IDE hardware light would stay on till I hard reset the machine. Information about my system can be found at - Kernel configuration file http://people.FreeBSD.org/~lioux/boot/kernel - sysctl settings http://people.FreeBSD.org/~lioux/boot/sysctl.conf - boot dmesg http://people.FreeBSD.org/~lioux/boot/dmesg.boot Please let me know if any additional information could be of help. On a side note, I placed this memory on another machine (k7s5a motherboard + FreeBSD 4.6R), the system was rock solid. :( Regards, ps: Please, CC: me when you reply. I only receive digests from this mailing list. -- Mario S F Ferreira - DF - Brazil - "I guess this is a signature." FreeBSD Committer | CS Developer flames to beloved devnull@someotherworldbeloworabove.org feature, n: a documented bug | bug, n: an undocumented feature
On Tue, Apr 08, 2003 at 12:56:10PM -0300, Mario Sergio Fujikawa Ferreira wrote:> Hi, > > Last thursday, I installed (20/Mar/2003) 2 kingston valueram > 512Mb PC2400 DDR333 (KVR333X64C25/512) sticks on my A7M266 running > up to date -STABLE. The system became unstable right after installation, > any form of system load triggered a kernel panic: "Page Fault While > In Kernel Mode". My main test was the usual 'make buildworld'.Make buildworld is by far the best memory test I ever found. I have had to return 3 sets of DIMMs before I had one that was stable on my system. The vendor did not have a problem with that, and remarked that he had found that AMD / VIA based mainboards tend to be more picky on memory. Once I got the right RAM the system proved as solid as a rock. -- | / o / /_ _ wilko@FreeBSD.org |/|/ / / /( (_) Bulte