Installing FreeBSD 6.1.0 on Dell Inspiron 700m laptop

The good news is that if you have 1G RAM (or less, I presume) it "just works"

The bad news is that if you have 2G RAM (as I do) plugging in the network cable crashes

You may be interested in knowing that my troubles first started back when FreeBSD 5.2.1 was shiny new, and I tried to install that

However, I'd rather focus on FreeBSD 6.1.0 and my current travails

Because of my troubles with 5.2.1 and my scattered nature, I've actually been running with Windows and only 1G RAM, and the 2nd Gig RAM card has been gathering dust in my apartment for some time now.

I had been told that 6.x and this laptop worked well, so I tried it, and it did.

However, when I found the 2nd RAM card and put it in, life got very bad, very fast

I'm not sure what "busdma dflt_lock" means, but it force the machine to reboot, so it's pretty bad.

Some things I've done to diagnose this:

• Took the card back out. Worked fine.
• Put the card back in, unplugged network cable. Worked fine.
• Tested RAM overnight with MEMTest 86+. 9+ hours. 7 Passes. 0 Errors.
• Ran Windows with 2nd card. Worked fine. Well, as fine as Windows ever works. :-)
• Re-installed with pretty minimal system. Base, man pages, ports dir, and whatsit... Not base, the other required thing. Crashes with 2nd RAM card and network, works fine without either one of them.

I've done a dumpdev and savecore thingie, and it's here

I'm happy to find, edit, and re-compile the source of the BFE driver, if anybody can suggest changes, and will submit a patch to the author. I was trying to do that back in the 5.2.1 days, but we got to where he didn't know what to suggest without having the hardware in front of him...