Date: Tue, 16 Mar 1999 14:53:39 -0500 (EST) From: "Bruce M. Walter" <walter@fortean.com> To: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Multia X-Files... Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990316101930.27748B-100000@aries.fortean.com>
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Hello all, This is not a complaint or request for help... Merely a report of my recent experiences with FreeBSD/alpha. I have a Personal Workstation 500au which I will eventually move into a role as my development server and thought it best to also pick up a Multia or two to act as frontline machines for tracking current, stable and such. 3.1-R seemed quite happy on my Miata (once I had labeled the disks with the 4.0-C utility ;) so I figured it was the place to start for the Multia as well. I've pretty much found that older Quantum drives + the NCR controller = CCB already dequeued problems, so I picked up an el-cheapo Fireball ST. It's working, although the tagged openings have a tendency to decrease and I can't turn off tagged queueing from camcontrol without freezing the drive. Unfortunately, I was unable to get the 4.0-C kernel from the 2/6 snap to load because of the kern_lock problems Julian fixed last night (thanks!), so I wound up using a 3.1-R kern.flp along with a 3.1-S mfsroot.flp to partition and install the 3.1-R distributions. This worked and produced a complete 3.1-R system I was able to build a kernel from. Now we get into the X-Files part ;) The system, under both 3.1-R and 3.1-S, would reboot without warning, apparently at random. This condition persisted. After several attempts at building world I assumed it to be faulty hardware, most likely memory. Since I had access to another Multia NCR controller, I popped it in... Still problems. Finally, the machine dropped into the the debugger instead of rebooting with no messages. The message was panic: ffs_valloc: dup inode In doing some searching, I found alot of similarities between my situation and the 'Dave Rivers memorial panic.' This in and of itself didn't seem strange, as I thought Dave's problems to be hardware related at the time. What *IS* a mystery to me is now that I can boot a 4.0-C kernel, the problems appear to be gone. With sources cvsupped as of late last night, I've built world successfully twice. I realize this is probably not very helpful, but wanted to post my observations. This could be either: 1) Matt's recent fixes to the VM stuff has produced VM code which doesn't exercise the faults in my hardware -or- 2) Matt's recent fixes to the VM stuff 'exorcised' the bugs causing my problems and possibly one of the more elusive, recurring panics in recent releases. I wonder if Dave still runs that old news server ;) Hopefully the second is true. Now, if I can just figure out how to get rid of those annoying dec_axppci_33_intr_map: bad interrupt pin 30 messages during the Multia's PCI probe, I'd be a happy man. Ideas anyone? - Bruce ______________________ Bruce M. Walter, Principal NIXdesign Group Inc. 426 S. Dawson Street Raleigh NC 27601 USA 919.829.4901 Tel (ext 11) 919.829.4993 Fax http://www.nixdesign.com Visual communications | concept + code To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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