Possible problems with Broadcom BCM5704C 10/100/1000 on Tyan Motherboard

[David O'Brien]

[ PLEASE don't top post - it losses context, and this is a Unix mailing list]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 04:53:24PM -0000, Alan Jay wrote:
> I had major problems installing with more than 4Gb but once I moved to stable
> we seemed to have a stable platform when doing basic stuff - we have two
> databases (mySQL) one is reasonably heavily used and one very extensively
> used.

Just to be clear, you're stating you had stability problems with
5.3-RELEASE and >4GB.  But with 5.3-STABLE and >4GB you have a stable
system.  Correct?

> I think I agree wholeheartedly with your comments being a great supporter of
> FreeBSD it is a shame that the AMD release is not as super as the other
> versions we have used extensively.

The problem is a major bug that has existed since FreeBSD ?3.0? was
exposed very close to the 5.3 release cycle.  This bug only causes a
major problem with >4GB, thus few of us developers experienced it.
[Most of us can't afford >4GB in our machines.  Donations of 1GB DIMMs
for FreeBSD developers are accepted by donations at FreeBSD.org.]

Of course one reason many are moving to the AMD64 platform is to have
>4GB RAM in the machine.  We believe this bug has been fixed in
5.3-STABLE.  But too few people are testing 5.3-STABLE and are using
5.3-RELEASE instead.  This isn't helping us QA the issue so that we know
all the corner cases are fixed in upcoming 5.4 release.

A recent 5.3-STABLE snapshot can be found as
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/Feb_2005/5.3-STABLE-SNAP001-amd64-miniinst.iso
and mirrors.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)