Tyan S2895 7.1 amd64 >4Gb RAM support?

[Max Laier]

On Friday 13 February 2009 19:00:31 Karl Pielorz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've a Tyan S2895 (bios 1.04), w/10Gb of ECC RAM onboard using 2 * Opteron
> 285's. The machine used to run WinXP x64, and Vista x64 (mostly doing video
> production, ray tracing etc.)
>
> I recently switched this machine to FreeBSD 7.1 amd64 - to run ZFS on it,
> but I've been having horrific problems with it.
>
> Basically, with more than ~3Gb of RAM usable in the system - it shows signs
> of chronic RAM problems (everything from sig11's through to failing to
> compile the kernel with 'weird' errors - as well as kernel panics, and
> spontaneous reboots).
>
> I've tested all the RAM (ECC is enabled on the BIOS) - it all tests fine
> (even if I jumble it up between different simms in different sockets etc.)
>
> By setting:
>
>  hw.physmem="3G"
>
> In loader.conf - I get a stable system.
>
> I've not setup any ZFS pools or anything yet, until I get the system
> stable. I've also tried changing the BIOS settings for the Memory Hole,
> IOMMU, MTRR etc. - all to no avail (nor does a BIOS 'use safe defaults'
> make any difference).

I have a S2882-D populated with 6GB (6x1G) running FreeBSD since early 7.  It 
took some tuning of the memory timing in the BIOS to get it to work, but ever 
since it works like a charm.

> It boots off the onboard nVidia RAID controller (a pair of 36Gb drives
> configured as RAID1), this shows up as:

Can you maybe try to take the nVidia RAID out of the equation?  I figure the 
"professional" version of the chip is not that common so maybe the corruption 
stems from the disk controller.

> "
> atapci0: <nVidia nForce CK804 UDMA133 controller> port
> 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0x1400-0x140f at device 6.0 on pci0
> ata0: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
> ata0: [ITHREAD]
> ata1: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
> ata1: [ITHREAD]
> atapci1: <nVidia nForce CK804 SATA300 controller> port
> 0x1440-0x1447,0x1434-0x1437,0x1438-0x143f,0x1430-0x1433,0x1410-0x141f mem
> 0xc0002000-0xc0002fff irq 22 at device 7.0 on pci0
> atapci1: [ITHREAD]
> ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
> ata2: [ITHREAD]
> ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
> ata3: [ITHREAD]
> atapci2: <nVidia nForce CK804 SATA300 controller> port
> 0x1458-0x145f,0x144c-0x144f,0x1450-0x1457,0x1448-0x144b,0x1420-0x142f mem
> 0xc0003000-0xc0003fff irq 23 at device 8.0 on pci0
> atapci2: [ITHREAD]
> ata4: <ATA channel 0> on atapci2
> ata4: [ITHREAD]
> ata5: <ATA channel 1> on atapci2
> ata5: [ITHREAD]
> ...
> ad8: 35304MB <WDC WD360GD-00FNA0 35.06K35> at ata4-master SATA150
> ad10: 35304MB <WDC WD360GD-00FNA0 35.06K35> at ata5-master SATA150
> ...
> ar0: 35304MB <nVidia MediaShield RAID1> status: READY
> ar0: disk0 READY (master) using ad10 at ata5-master
> ar0: disk1 READY (mirror) using ad8 at ata4-master
> Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ar0s1a
> "
>
> Anyone got any ideas? - At this time, I can't prove 100% whether it's the
> disk controller messing up and corrupting data as it's loaded into RAM, or
> data getting corrupt once in RAM that's causing the crashes - all I know is
> with ~3Gb RAM - either by physically pulling SIMMs or using the hw.physmem
> option - it works fine.
>
> I tried booting 8.0-CURRENT-200812-amd64-disc1.iso - to see if anything was
> different with this hardware in 8.0 - but unfortunately that doesn't boot
> past the BTX loader on this machine, regardless of how much RAM is / isn't
> in it :(

Any more details on how it fails would help.

-- 
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