5.3-release fine with 512MB RAM, reboots at times with 1.5GB (but no panic)

[Jim Pazarena]

Jean Lagarde wrote:

> I have been troubleshooting reboots over the last weekend, I think I 
> might have enough clues now to get some useful hints from an expert.
> 
> FreeBSD 5.3-release (see dmesg below for details)
> 
> The problem seems to be with trying to run with 1.5GB vice 512MB of RAM. 
> The system has not had problems so far when I only leave the 512MB stick 
> in. When I add the 1GB stick the system will reboot at specific times, 
> for example, while trying to launch KDE3 or trying to make OpenOffice 
> (always reboots at "Extracting for openoffice-1.1.2-1"). I do not see 
> any panic in the messages log, the system just silently reboots.
> 
> I initially installed FreeBSD with only the 512MB stick in.
> 
> The memory itself seems fine; memtest86 detects no errors.
> 

I too have a similar problem. I have 7 identical systems. all with
identical MoBo's SCSI hard drives and RAM.

One machine reboots frequently with 5.3 where with 4.9 it "never"
rebooted. 6 machines are fine. 1 reboots. I changed memory sticks.
(which incidentally always pass an extensive memory test). I even
changed the power supply on the computer.

The last thing I am going to change is the MoBo. Perhaps it has some
timing issue discovered only with 5.3. Luckily when I needed 7 MoBos,
I purchased 8 and have a spare.

This is mystery, because as I said, 4.9 worked fine on this machine.

regards, Jim