Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 01:14:16 -0500 From: The Babbler <bts@babbleon.org> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> Cc: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bridging with 3C589D-COMBO on 4.2-RELEASE? Message-ID: <3AADBAB8.36039542@babbleon.org> References: <3AAC4C03.13000DE@babbleon.org> <3AAC4E83.2C281B90@babbleon.org> <15021.46309.150521.925816@nomad.yogotech.com>
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In fairness to FreeBSD, I've been spending a lot of time getitng things configured and most of my really annoying crashes have been while I was in the midst of configuring or testing my ethernet setup (interface, bridging, networking). But I could do that *without* crashing Linux all the time--essentially the only time it crashes is when you use experimental drivers, in my experience. Perhaps all PCMCIA support under FreeBSD should be considered quasi-experimental or something, but I'm deliberately avoiding using anything but stock 4.2-RELEASSE in order to (hopefully) get maximum stability. For example, it froze both last night and tonight while I was trying to get vmware networking set up properly. But it's not just that; my gateway/firewall just locks up with the PCMCIA light stuck on about every couple of weeks. And making it all especially bad is that I've FreeBSD lose file contents (revert to zero length) after rebooting, even on files that hadn't actually been updated any time close to when the lockup occured. So . . . Perhaps my machine is mis-configured, but how would I go about figuring out what's wrong and configuring it properly? Lord knows I've bugged this list plenty over the past few months trying to get it all right . . . (In fairness, I should note that Linux PCMCIA support appears to be superior to everybody else's. It's certainly superior to Windows as well as FreeBSD.) PS: There are *other* things I like about FreeBSD: The scripts are easier to work with by far. The first real O/S I ever used was BSD circa 1981. I was able to get printing working, including working under Samba, which I could never, ever do with Linux despite untold hours of beating my head against that particular wall. Overall it's worth it anyway, but I was expecting the same or more stability, not a Windows-like tradeoff . . . Sorry, I'm babbling. Anyway, any suggestions for determining the source of such crashes. For the fully-configured system, since the lockups happen only every couple of weeks, it's not really feasible to leave kernel tracing permanently on or anything like that. And these "crashes" of which I speak are system lockups, not kernel panics--there's no recovery possible becuase it locks up tight as a drum and I have to power off. Nor is this just an X display problem, for it also happens to my gateway/firewall, which doesn't even have X installed. How would you deal with such problems? Nate Williams wrote: > > > PS: In my experience, though FreeBSD has lots of advantages, it is > > *much* less stable than Linux. It's crashed -way- more than Linux ever > > did; more even than Windows does at work (of course I push Windows a lot > > less). And I've had it lose files a couple of times when it came back > > up after a hard crash like that. > > > > Is this at all normal? > > Is it at all normal for folks with laptops? > > In the last 4 years on my laptop, I've had 3 crashes, and two of them > were related to running the machine completely out of memory. Newer > versions of FreeBSD have patches that Matt Dillon wrote to fix these > kind of crashes, but I wasn't then (nor am now) running a version with > this fix. > > FreeBSD *rarely* if ever crashes on properly configured, correctly > functioning hardware. If you mis-configure things such as VMWARE which > get very cozy with the kernel and hardware, you will see crashes. > > My very strong suspicion is that you're boxed is misconfigured. > Unfortunately, Linux may make it easier for you to configure your > hardware correctly, so in some respects that it's difficult to configure > your hardware correctly could be considered a 'bug' in FreeBSD. > > Nate > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message -- "Brian, the man from babble-on" bts@babbleon.org Brian T. Schellenberger http://www.babbleon.org Support http://www.eff.org. Support decss defendents. Support http://www.programming-freedom.org. Boycott amazon.com. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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