Memory problems and core dumps in A/UX 2.0
Conrad C. Nobili
conrad at popvax.harvard.edu
Thu May 2 13:20:17 AEST 1991
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....
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