Tyan S2895 7.1 amd64 >4Gb RAM support?

[Karl Pielorz]

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).

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

"
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 :(

-Kp