Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 22:51:51 +0000 (MST) From: Jeremy Chatfield <jdc@crab.xinside.com> To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph P. Kukulies) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: is it hardware? Message-ID: <199501190551.WAA13990@crab.xinside.com> In-Reply-To: <199501182114.WAA20475@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> from "Christoph P. Kukulies" at Jan 18, 95 10:14:42 pm
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Christoph P. Kukulies writes:
...
> I'm running the X server of Xinside, Inc.. Pretty nice server
> but while playing with wb (whiteboard) and scrolling a picture
> the server died and the system was doing a bus error on every
> cc invocation during making a kernel. I rebooted and the
> core dumps had disappeared. But I had strange characters
> in two included files (../../sys/queue.h had a ((ead) instead
> of (head) in a macro and some other file was in error,
> st2uct instead of struct.
Some of you may be aware that our Server is configured to send email,
by default, with a human readable stack trace and the configuration
file in use... We have received the email from this event. There is
no immediately obvious reason why the Server would fail in the
function that died. Our first guess was that the machine might be a
486SX or similar no-FPU system, but that seems to be false.
This leaves us with two likely candidates:
+ Something to do with 'wb'
+ Hey, it's just one of those strange things, y'know?
Of the two, a 'wb' explanation is the preferred, since it is testable.
Not, however, by us - until someone mails me the location of the
programs. I deleted the email with the locations before I read this
mail.
> So I wonder when these files got corrupted. During sup?
> What might be the cause for such instabilities? Memory?
> ISA bus? VL Bus?
On the basis of prior experience, we found that the proportion of
inexplicable system failures dropped significantly when we switched
to using UPS's on all machines. Under the category of "one of those
strange things", count very short power supply interruptions. I'm
not sure about your power supply company, but in the UK and the US,
they don't count interruptions of below a couple of seconds. That is
a delay long enough to cause most systems to reboot. If shorter, you
may simply get a bad sag. At the other end, could you have received
a spike in the voltage - are you near a Physics Lab, for example :-)
Cheers, JeremyC.
--
Jeremy Chatfield, +1(303)470-5302, FAX:+1(303)470-5513, email:jdc@xinside.com
X Inside Inc, P O Box 10774, Golden, CO 80401-0610, USA.
Commercial X Server - for more information please try these services
http://www.xinside.com info@xinside.com ftp.xinside.com
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