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Date:      Tue, 29 Oct 1996 22:26:34 -0800 (PST)
From:      Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
To:        Nadav Eiron <nadav@barcode.co.il>
Cc:        adrian@virginia.edu, FreeBSD Questions List <questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: instability with 2.1.5 kernel
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.94.961029222330.369W-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
In-Reply-To: <32747178.2677@barcode.co.il>

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On Mon, 28 Oct 1996, Nadav Eiron wrote:

> >         When shutting down my 2.1.5-RELEASE system, the kernel is failing
> > with alarming regularity to flush all of the buffers.  I frequently see
> > about a dozen 4's and the a "giving up" message before the system
> > reboots.  When the systme comes up the root filesystem and sometimes
> > others are not marked clean and must be fsck'ed.
> > 
> >         Has anyone else seen this?
> 
> Yes! I never bothered to post to questions (or stable) about it as I seldom
> shutdown my machines, but almost whenever I do, I can see this symptom. There
> are other weird things with shutdown on 2.1.5: For example, shutting down from
> an xterm (which used to work just fine) would hang up the machine instead of
> switching back to the console vty0 before halting.

I haven't seen any failures to flush on any of my machines, but I have
seen "lockups" (esp. with 3.1.2S) when shutting down from X.  The system
really hasn't locked up, the console has gotten locked out but it really
is shutting down.

> >         I have also seen a 'shutdown -h +0' go directly to rebooting.

That doesn't directly reboot; it halts the system giving no guard time,
but doesn't actually force a reboot -- it says "press any key to reboot".
It's equivalent to 'shutdown -h now'

You may have meant 'shutdown -r now' which _does_ restart.

> >         Bad hardware or a bug?
> 
> I guess it's a bug of some sortrs, as I see the same behaviour on two machines
> (though I only shut them down for kernel rebuilds and the such, which is not
> very often).

It depends.  It may be that your SCSI controller is trying to quit to
quickly or the system is telling the SCSI controller to flush out too
late/early.  

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major




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