memory holes

[Olivier Gautherot]

Hi Erik!

Mixing memory modules with different speeds is generally a dangerous thing to 
do. I would strongly recommend you match them all. The fact that your 384MB 
configuration worked is in no way a garantee that the 512MB config you 
describe should work (I would even say that it is a miracle that it ever 
worked in the first place). The problems you describe with the various *BSD 
sound very much like soft errors - which may happen with out-of-spec bus 
frequency.

Merry Christmas
Olivier

On Saturday 23 December 2006 14:30, Erik Udo wrote:
> OK. I've tested OpenBSD and NetBSD.
>
> Both find 512MB of ram, but..
> NetBSD crashes after boot stage when it starts to load the kernel.
> (thanks NetBSD team for not building the kernel image with debugging
> symbols, but you did build it with DDB)
>
> OpenBSD finds 512MB of ram too, but...
> it wont find my hard disk, even thought it has wd0 as a hard disk in dmesh.
>
> To add to my previous post, i tested with 128MB PC100 + 32MB PC100. Both
> memory modules was found by FreeBSD and put to use.
>
> Which leads me to the conclusion: Why can't FreeBSD use PC133 memory
> when OpenBSD can? Did someone forget to port drivers for memory modules? :P
>
> Erik Udo wrote:
> > I upgraded my hardware and software yesturday, and for some reason,
> > FreeBSD only 'detects' 128MB of the memory, when the BIOS is clearly
> > seeing 512MB. OpenBSD also finds 512MB of memory.
> >
> > So i added one 128MB ECC memory. There was one 128MB PC100 and 256MB
> > PC133 memory before, and it worked fine on 6.2-PRERELASE.
> >
> > Now that i upgraded to 6.2-RC1, from 6.2-PRERELEASE and added the 128MB
> > memory to the 384MB i had, the kernel started giving me this error on
> > the first line of the kernel output:
> > "Too many holes in the physical address space, giving up"
> >
> > Now, i searched google for anything, and found this earlier thread:
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org/msg01624.html
> >
> > I also found this:
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2005-October/013932.ht
> >ml
> >
> > Like the previous post says, the memory was found after the increased
> > PHYSMAP_SIZE. I increased mine to 2*32, later 2*128. It didn't work.
> >
> > Also someone told me to add this line to the kernel config:
> > options         MAXMEM=524288
> >
> > That didn't work either.
> >
> > I also tried to toggle all the bios settings on the computer, i even
> > upgraded the bios. Nothing.
> >
> > Now i found out that OpenBSD sees 512MB of memory, so there must be some
> > kind of trick to make FreeBSD recognize that memory too.
> >
> > Here is some output of my verbose boot:
> >
> > with 512MB:
> > real memory  = 134234112 (128 MB)
> > Physical memory chunk(s):
> > 0x0000000000001000 - 0x000000000009efff, 647168 bytes (158 pages)
> > 0x0000000000100000 - 0x00000000003fffff, 3145728 bytes (768 pages)
> > 0x0000000000c25000 - 0x0000000007d82fff, 118874112 bytes (29022 pages)
> > avail memory = 121798656 (116 MB)
> >
> > Anyone have any ideas?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Erik
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org mailing list
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to
> > "freebsd-hardware-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-hardware at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hardware-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

-- 
Olivier Gautherot
Email:    olivier at gautherot.net
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ogautherot
MSN:      ogautherot at hotmail.com