conrad@popvax.harvard.edu (Conrad C. Nobili) (05/02/91)
A/UX 2.0 and memory problems. I bought myself a copy of A/UX 2.0 a couple of months ago and haven't been able to get it going properly in the time I've had to mess with it. I am posting my problem here because I'll be danged if I am going to waste my 30 days free phone support on a stupid installation-type problem. I would like to save it for when I have a REAL problem. I have already pursued this a little bit with Apple technical support (dealer support -- I am part of the organization at Harvard that constitutes an Apple dealership -- I do software technical support). It wasn't clear to me that I was converging on a solution with this channel, so I thought I'd appeal to the broad and infinite wisdom of the net. Ok, I have installed A/UX several times now. I was doing all the usual cocky things that someone with my Mac experience would do at first. Like using a current version of the system software rather than the 6.0.5 disks that were shipped with the A/UX 2.0 distribution. And other things we needn't go into. Finally I just did everything from scratch with all the A/UX 2.0 distribution stuff. Several times. All with the same result. Some basic facts. I have an SE/30. It came from Apple with an internal 80M hard disk and 4M RAM. SCSIProbe 2.03 says that the drive is a Quantum P80S 980-80-94... version 9.6 if that means anything to anyone. I have the A/UX 2.0 CD-ROM distribution. In anticipation of A/UX I got myself 16M RAM (4M SIMMs) from Technology Works. I have an E-Machines Z-21 monitor. My CD-ROM drive is a Chinon CDA-431 (SCSIProbe says that it is a CDS-431 version H42). Everything else should be irrelevant. The problem I see is persistent Memory fault complaints. Here is what greets me in the CommandShell 1 window upon starting up A/UX 2.0: ******************************************************************************* * * * W E L C O M E T O A / U X * * * ******************************************************************************* -sh: 124 Memory fault - core dumped / FILES bin/ dev/ lib/ mac/ newunix root/ tmp/ users/ Useful Commands/ core etc/ lost+found/ mnt/ nextunix shlib/ unix* usr/ # So what gives? I decided to look at the A/UX System Console and see what it had to say for itself. Here it is: Running on mc68030 mc68882 Floating Point Coprocessor ID 1 Onboard SCC serial driver. fd:floppy driver ver 1.9; SWIM chip, d0 is an FDHD Drive mc68030 caching enabled tc:Apple 40SC tape driver ver 1.4 Motherboard Localtalk total memory size: 20971520 bytes available memory: 17211392 bytes I/O Acceleration: version g21, maxba=7, maxwb=7 Scroll up in this window to see old console messages. Naturally, this lead me to wonder about a few things. First, what does the available memory number mean? The only sense I can make out of it is that it is 17M - 600K. Is that a meaningful amount? And do my memory problems have anything to do with my ROMs? Seeing all of the recent discussion of "dirty" ROMs first made me wonder about this. I had been under the impression that these things were only MacOS issues though. And in fact an Apple support per- son told me that A/UX patches all of those problems. Needless to say I tried all sorts of things to get around the memory faults and core dumps. Well, ok, I am not a real UNIX wizard, so I only tried a few things. The only intelligent thing I tried was using kconfig to set MAXPMEM to various smaller values. It wasn't clear to me that this did anything at all. Upon shutdown and restart the System Console still reported the above values for total memory size and available memory. And I still had the memory faults. I know that I really should take my Mac apart again and remove the 4M SIMMs. (Oh, yes I did put them in Bank A, by the way.) It is a real pain in the *ss to get inside there and swap memory without having to take the video board out (I can just barely do it with my skinny fingers). I want to see if anyone out there can tell me that I do or do not have to do this before I bother.... How does one check that memory is ok? I know that at least 4M of the new mem- ory is fine, as MacOS is happy with 8M useable memory. I can't use System 7.0 betas to check it since I have the buggy ("dirty") ROMs. So all I can check it with is A/UX. Is that right? If it is any help, I had no problem with the RAMdisk software that came with the 4M SIMMs. I am inclined to believe that the memory itself is fine, but would welcome any suggestions as to how I can prove that.... Well, I hope that someone can shed some light on this. I just spent the last couple of days perusing the aux.support.apple.com archives of c.u.a and didn't find any previous postings about SE/30s with lots of memory and A/UX 2.0. Are there others out there with 20M in an SE/30 running A/UX 2.0? Any others who have encountered similar memory problems and can either explain them or fix them? I would greatly appreciate any help and info I can get. I would very much like to start _using_ A/UX 2.0(.1 -- since I have two monitors, but first things first). I don't mind error-riddled installation instructions and man- uals -- I can deal with that -- one has to become adept at reading between the lines and through the typos and brainos in this business -- but it is a real drag when things simply don't work and the Troubleshooting section of the man- ual has mostly really dumb or self-explanatory things in it which can be found elsewhere.... Well, please don't hesitate with your thoughts or suggestions. Send e-mail or post, as you wish.... +---- C o n r a d C . N o b i l i ----+ | | | Harvard University | Internet: conrad@harvarda.harvard.edu | | Office for Info. Tech. | conrad@popvax.harvard.edu | | Information Services | BITNET: CONRAD AT HARVARDA | | Technical & User Services | CONRAD AT HARVSPHB | | 1730 Cambridge Street | voice: (617) 495-8554 | +---- Cambridge, MA 02138 | fax: (617) 495-0715 ----+
ksand@Apple.COM (Kent Sandvik, 120dB or more) (05/03/91)
In article <6627@husc6.harvard.edu> conrad@popvax.harvard.edu (Conrad C. Nobili) writes: >A/UX 2.0 and memory problems. Hi, this is maybe a shot in the dark, but try to take out the SIMMs, and just run with the basic memory config (4Mb?). If this works, and then you insert the SIMMS and get the problems again, I would suspect SIMMS with too slow access time. I think the "dirty ROM" issue you mention has to do with 32-bit clean ROMS, starting from ci towards the new machines. It only means that you can't run in 32-bit mode under System 7. You can happily use System 7 with 8Mb or less, or use A/UX with more than 8Mb memory. I'm not sure, eventually there are other issues as well, but I would check the SIMMs to start with. Kent -- Kent Sandvik, DTS Rock Lobster Disclaimer: I am not working with Public Relations.