Possible problems with Broadcom BCM5704C 10/100/1000 on Tyan Motherboard (2)

[Alan Jay]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David O'Brien [mailto:obrien at freebsd.org]
> 
> 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?

[Alan Jay] Further to my comments yesterday - I would say that the system
appeared to be stable.  It is possible that when we ran a more extensive and
more often hit database that it used more memory and that is what caused the
problem.  BUT all the tests we did relating to memory didn't turn up any
issues - so we looked for other culprits.

One of the few errors we saw was relating to the Broadcom Gigabit link - I
will try to do some tests in the next week or so using the other onboard
Ethernet controller to see if that rules out the Broadcom or focuses the cause
of the problem.
 
> > 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.
> 
> 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.

[Alan Jay] Thanks for this and it was exactly the reason we moved to the AMD64
platform.
 
> 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)