I have an Amptron PM8900 Motherboard using the Intel 430VX Chipset with a
100MHz AMD K5 processor and 32MB of SDRAM.

Has anyone seen problems with this setup before?
Any known issues with NetBSD and the AMD K5 processor?

I have been hunting down weird rebooting and Bus Error problems seemingly
caused by this board. I finally just swapped the board out with a known working
Pentium 200 Board / 440BX Chipset / 128MB RAM. Magically, all my problems went
away.

The system ran through memory diagnostics perfectly, cache checked out, passed
all other diagnostics. It has been seemingly "stable" running NetBSD-1.4.2 for
at least two months, with only an occasional unexplained kernel crash. (I
tried NetBSD-1.5, but it crashed very consisantly with high disk I/O. Should
have been my first clue.) It would even completely compile a new kernel
without incident. However, compiling much of anything under pkgsrc would
randomly pop up a Bus Error / Core Dump.

Smells to me like maybe a DMA timing problem?

I guess I'm looking for any other people's experiences with this Chipset /
Processor. Should I suspect the Processor (AMD K5,) the board, or the memory??

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in Advance!

Gerry Simmons
simmons@darykon.cet.com