On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 08:12:45AM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > Regarding other comments: a bad RTC battery can cause issues with installation > (HTTPS certificates not being valid), but that's not your problem. I've never > seen a bad RTC battery cause a panic on a PC system, and in fact, some OpenBSD > supported platforms don't even have a battery backed RTC. I've installed and > ran OpenBSD on a lot of machines with dead batteries.
I've seen a bad RTC battery cause random reboots after five to ten minutes on a machine that was otherwise happily running OpenBSD. In other words, the machine would boot and operate as normal, then either freeze or reboot. It always ran for at least a minute or two first. It was a tedious problem to diagnose, because although I was aware that the BIOS battery was non-functional, the fact that the machine booted and appeared to work left me checking RAM, PSU, etc, all the things that you would usually associate with such behaviour. I avoided replacing the BIOS battery exactly because if the motherboard was faulty, then it would be discarded, wasting the newly unwrapped cell. Eventually the tediousness of resetting a couple of BIOS options every time I power cycled the machine, (instead of just rebooting it), made me replace the battery anyway, and amazingly the random reboots disappeared. For reference the motherboard was an Intel D525MW. If I'm not mistaken, Jan Stary also has, (or had), one of these. > i386 vs amd64...yeah, if amd64 works on this machine, use it, unless you have > a > compelling reason not to. MIGHT solve your problem...keep in mind, i386 is > now > really a legacy platform, and doesn't receive as much use (and thus, testing) > as > amd64 at this time. I'm not saying an OS bug shouldn't be found and fixed, > but a > HW bug (and yes, that's a strong possibility here) won't receive the attention > on i386 that it might on amd64. Well, if people stop testing and using i386 then support for the architecture will likely rot more quickly than it would if it remains in use.
