A while ago, I upgraded BIOS and NetBSD simultaneously.  Probably
a bad thing to do.  (^&

I saw a lot of stability problems, and others were complaining as well.
Reverting NetBSD didn't seem like a good thing if I wanted to contribute
to testing NetBSD/amd64, and I figured that the BIOS update would only
affect boot configuration.  I didn't really think that it would be
killing my system (causing kernel panics with some frequency).

I tried installing a couple of drive-bay fans to see if that would help
and it didn't.

Finally, I thought, maybe it *was* a BIOS problem.  I fished out the
old BIOS and reinstalled it.

Now, NetBSD seems to be rock solid again.

Rather than crashing, it periodically seizes up for a little bit, but
that's nicer than crashing.  (^&

I can't be 100% certain that it's stable now, but I've cleaned out my
entire package system and have rebuilt EMACS (with its requirements)
and am well along the way to rebuilding Doxygen.  No crashes.  That
would be just about impossible with this system yesterday.


This is a major issue.  The crashes were so bad and frequent
that I was considering making LINUX the primary OS for this
machine (it does DRI on the AMD64, too; (^&).  On LINUX, I get
occasional application crashes, but the kernel doesn't panic
(as often) as NetBSD did.

The BIOS that I was running was, last I checked, the most recent
version provided by the motherboard manufacturer.


Just an ongoing data point in things.

P.S.: Someone asked before but I didn't see a response.  Is it just
an oversight that the AMD64 port is not listed in the changes from
1.6 to 2.0?  Or is the AMD64 not yet officially supported?

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/