Pre-Loaded Drivers? (was Re: ethernet driver problems)

[Thad P Floryan]

rmfowler at texrex.uucp (Rex Fowler) in <1991Jan12.045541.286 at texrex.uucp> writes:

	>These are the exact same errors I was getting over the last 4 months.
	>They WERE caused by loadable drivers. (Not the ethernet driver but a
	>loadable driver nonetheless).  See my previous posting.

	wouldn't you know that after almost 3 days (and only moments after
	I posted that I solved the problem), I CRASHED!!!  Same symptoms
	as before (NMI, kernel parity error, etc..).  dammit, dammit, dammit!

This is WEIRD.  I have one driver/interface_card such that if I power down
the device to which the card is attached, then power it back up, same things:
NMI, kernel parity errors, etc.  It was driving me crazy back in October and
November at which time I resigned myself to keeping the device powered up all
the time and my system has remained up since November 12 with no problems.

There is NOTHING wrong with the RAM in my systems (re: "parity" error).

I'm wondering whether this is something analogous to the printer problem I
fixed on a friend's 3B1 last year.  He had called me up one evening and said
"Hey, Thad, every time I do a screen dump with SHIFT-PRINT I get a parity
error and the system crashes." At first I was incredulous, but I did listen to
his description of the problem and decided to examine the schematics when, lo
and behold, the chip servicing the parallel printer port has a (spare?) gate
though which the *PERR signal is routed (for buffering? it's sure NOT obvious
from the schematics) and after I replaced that chip (a 74LS244 at 15P, see the
schematics page 15, top center of page) the problem went away.

Point being, there "might" be some side-effects of certain drivers OR their
respective expansion card(s) that are falsely triggering these events.

Question is: WHAT card(s) OR driver(s) OR motherboard revision levels do we all
have in common?  And what kernel version?

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com ]