Re: FreeBSD Crashes with AMD

On Wednesday 07 January 2004 18:48, Don Lewis wrote:
> Back when Via allowed mere mortals to download their chipset manuals, I
> looked at the KT266, KT333 and/or KT400 manuals and they seemed to claim
> ECC support.  I never found any motherboards using these chipsets that
> supported ECC RAM.  These days the tech support links on their chipset

My experience also :(

> pages lead to pages full of press releases.  I think Via only releases
> chipset manuals to their "partners" these days.  About the only Athlon
> XP motherboards that I've found that support ECC use the AMD-761
> chipset. Unfortunately these don't support the newer Athlon XPs and they
> seem to be disappearing from the market.  They ones that are left are
> really inexpensive, though.  The Gigabyte GA7-DX+ I bought about a year
> or so ago was very reasonably priced at the time and performs well.  My
> suspicion is that the recent lack of ECC support may be due to AMD
> wanting to move "serious" users over to their new 64 bit architecture.

Maybe, it seems to me that there is a huge gap between desktop and server..
I stopped buying 'server' boards for work when they started having dual 
ethernet and dual U160 SCSI - it is pointless to have such things for a 
system which doesn't do much IO (ie use an IDE disk) and only has a modem 
connection..
Unfortunately there is not much of a middle ground, and ECC supporting boards 
are hard to find if you don't want server boards (at least in my neck of the 
woods). I'd be happy to be proved wrong :)

> >> FreeBSD *needs* to have ECC since it is already such a
> >> reliable OS -- you don't want your uptime spoiled by a memory
> >> failure, do you?:-)
> >
> > It would be nice, but there are patches out there, grab them, clean them
> > up and submit them :)
>
> Pointers?
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=111743+0+archive/2001/freebsd-hackers/20010318.freebsd-hackers

It's kind of old though.. There was someone claiming to be trying to port it 
to be less hacky, but I haven't heard anything for a while..

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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