fatal lockup, BIOS/CMOS reset?

fatal lockup, BIOS/CMOS reset?

[Jonathan Brugge]

I was experimenting with Hunt, a program I found. This caused some heavy 
load, and my system had already quite some programs running, so I think I 
got out of memory (no programs got killed, shouldn't that be done by the 
VM?). Maybe it was for some other reason, but my system locked, I had to use 
CTRL-ALT-DELETE. This seemed to work, my HD made some sound and it rebooted. 
But then: I got a message about a bad CMOS and when I looked in my 
BIOS-settings I saw they were totally reset... No HD's, date was 1/1/2000, 
etc.
After setting everything to the correct value I tried to boot again and no 
problem this time, not even about a partition that was unmounted 
incorrectly. It seems to me that no program may EVER have a chance to change 
things in BIOS/CMOS.I'm running kernel 2.4.0test11 with libc6-2.2.5 (Debian 
woody, if it matters).

1: Is it possible that a program sets options in BIOS/CMOS?
2: If so, should it be possible?
3: Any other things that could cause this to happen?

I'm not sure it's a kernel-related problem, but it's something that should 
never happen, in my opinion (except BIOS-flashing).

Thanks,

Jonathan Brugge

P.S.: My system: Gigabyte GA-7IXE mainboard, K7-700, 128 MB, AMD 751/756 
chipset.
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Re: fatal lockup, BIOS/CMOS reset?

[Timur Tabi]

** Reply to message from "Jonathan Brugge" <jonathan_brugge@hotmail.com> on
Sun, 10 Dec 2000 22:49:05 +0100


> I got a message about a bad CMOS and when I looked in my 
> BIOS-settings I saw they were totally reset... No HD's, date was 1/1/2000, 
> etc.

The BIOS will do this at boot time if it detects that the checksum bytes in the
CMOS are incorrect.  That's probably what happened - somehow, one or more bytes
in your CMOS got altered, and during the reboot the BIOS detected this and reset
all CMOS bytes.

The CMOS can be programmed using I/O ports 70h and 71h.  Just a couple of bad
I/O operations to those ports, and your CMOS is toast.


-- 
Timur Tabi - ttabi@interactivesi.com
Interactive Silicon - http://www.interactivesi.com

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