SGI: Hardware

I hate making another thread about this beast but, this question was actually buried in the power supply thread and it never really got answered.

How do you change the memory configuration on a 350 ? Like going from 1gb simm to 512mb simm. I've gone through all the manuals I could find but, there doesn't seem to be any mention of how to do it. I can't see anything in the L1 controller that could do it and you can't boot to EFI if the memory all fails obviously. All these 350's had similar memory in them when I looked. A mix of 1gb and 512mb simm. All the ram I am using came out of them.

I understand the bank layout so it isn't that. If I put 4 1gb simm in bank 0 it boots fine. If I put 4 512mb simm in bank 0 it spits out all sorts of errors. It looks it still thinks they are 1gb and doesn't automatically detect what size simm are installed.

Here's a bit of the errors it gives when trying a bank of 512mb. It just repeats the same sort of message for every simm installed:

MAIN MEMORY ERROR:
************************************************

Address: 8000003000000000
Location: 001c01#0
Subtest: Base + Walk/Inv

Expected: aa55aa55aa55aa55,aa55aa55aa55aa55
Actual: 55aa55aa55aa55aa,55aa55aa55aa55aa
Difference: ffffffffffffffff,ffffffffffffffff

Suspect DIMM: DIMM0 N0_L_BUS_X
Bit Mask 0x3cff00003cff0fff,0x3cff00003cff0fff

Suspect DIMM: DIMM0 N0_R_BUS_X
Bit Mask 0xc300ffffc300f000,0xc300ffffc300f000
************************************************

It may not help you so much, but here is my experience.

When I received my altixes 350, the RAM banks were only half populated. Since then I added as many modules as possible and then powered the machine on. It simply worked out without any error message. For instance you can see here the result in SuSe. All the RAM is recognized and working. I've never faced any instability or hang-out.

Are you sure that your specific RAM modules work properly and are not damaged ? If you would like more info/output from my machine to compare with yours, just tell me what you need. I'll travel a lot these next weeks, but may find 10 minutes to power it on...

Good luck.

BetXen wrote:
Are you sure that your specific RAM modules work properly and are not damaged ?
Good luck.

I am pretty sure they are ok and compatible. They were installed in the Altix boxes. I have 24 of them and it would be hard to imagine all 24 being bad. When they were in the 350's the systems were a mixed combination of banks of 1gb simm and banks of 512mb simm.

When you added simm were they all 1gb simm by chance ? I haven't had any trouble changing banks of them other when I had a bad one and the Altix shut off the bank it was in permanently. I never did learn how to re-enable the bank and ended up using a different cpu board. I think it is a command in the POD part of EFI. I can find no information at all about POD commands.

Seems to me what I need is a Altix 350 service or hardware manual. The user guide seems to have been written at the grade school level. It has bright pretty colorful pictures but, not a lot of details.