I have an Axil 320 (a SPARCstation 20 clone) with a pair of 60Mhz SM61 SuperSPARC CPUs that was never very stable running NetBSD 2.x (both 2.0.x and 2.1.x). It would run for 10-15 days and then halt to the PROM, without a backtrace. Naturally I suspected a hardware problem, and suspected it was disk related (the disk is connected via a wide-to-narrow SCSI converter).

I’ve since upgraded the machine to 3.0_STABLE (as part of my upgrade orgy) and it’s now been up for 37 days. This week I noticed a few of these in the system log:
cpu0: NMI: system interrupts: 10000000
memory error:
EFSR: 9d01<ce ,DW=0,SYNDROME=9d>
MBus transaction: 8fffcd30<vah =0,TYPE=3,SIZE=5,C,VA=ff,S,MID=8>
address: 0x0101bb060
module location: J0202

It seems the machine has a faulty DSIMM (in slot J0202) – more than likely the cause of the crashes. Sadly I’ve been having a bit of bad luck with 200-pin DSIMMs lately (had a faulty one in my SPARCstation 10 a few weeks ago).

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