About a month and a half ago I installed Debian Potato on my Cyrix 686-150(200) system with 32Mb of each of RAM and swap. My experience has been fairly positive, but I am having an extremely annoying problem with hard lockups.
I quickly determined that these lockups seemed to be reproducible. Certain files tend to cause lockups when used. I've found a variety of files that do this - a gimp image I did (gzipping or copying), running mozilla m4 uncompressed, decompressing kernel source 2.2.5, etc. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the reboot fsck also seems to choke on this section of disk. It actually seems to be an off and on problem - more on than off - it takes me about 1-20 (random) reboots until the fsck will actually complete without a hard lockup. This little exercise can take around two hours out of my time. Luckily it doesn't seem to be doing too much damage. I'm suspecting something doesn't either like a specific disk position or consecutive positions, or a specific stream of bytes. I'm looking at either hardware, kernel or cmos settings. I'm running a dual boot system and my hardware has previously worked well on Win95, although i believe the motherboard had drivers. My mboard chipset is "VXPro-II PCI" and I'm using IDE. I've tried the 2.0.36 and 2.2.5 package images and compiling my own 2.2.1 and 2.0.36. I've been pointed to IDE bug workaround kernel compile options, but have tried them turned on. I've checked out the cmos and fiddled with any options that look like they might be a problem. I've tried reading various documentation suggested on the Debian pages (user faq, hardware compatibility), looking for bug reports, etc. So apologies if I've missed something somewhere. All this has come to no avail, so I can only ask the wider populace - do you know what the deal is here? Where is or how could I work out the problem? What can I do about it? Any help would be appreciated. A 'dmesg' output from a successful boot is included from my 2.2.5 kernel. Linux version 2.2.5 ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) (gcc version egcs-2.91.63 19990224 (egcs-1.1.2 pre-release-3)) #2 Fri Apr 16 18:58:40 EST 1999 Console: colour VGA+ 80x50 Calibrating delay loop... 149.50 BogoMIPS Memory: 29920k/32768k available (1600k kernel code, 412k reserved, 712k data, 124k init) Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok. VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.4.0 initialized CPU: Cyrix 6x86L 2x Core/Bus Clock stepping 02 Checking 386/387 coupling... OK, FPU using exception 16 error reporting. Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK. Checking for popad bug... OK. POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdb31 PCI: Probing PCI hardware Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2 Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039 NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0 IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP Starting kswapd v 1.5 Real Time Clock Driver v1.09 tpqic02: Runtime config, $Revision: 1.10 $, $Date: 1997/01/26 07:13:20 $ tpqic02: DMA buffers: 20 blocks RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size loop: registered device at major 7 PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device 2a, VID=3388, DID=8013 PCI_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later hda: Maxtor 72004 AP, ATA DISK drive hdb: ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 24X MAXIMUM, ATAPI CDROM drive hdc: Traxdata CDRW2260+, ATAPI CDROM drive ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14 ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15 hda: Maxtor 72004 AP, 1916MB w/128kB Cache, CHS=973/64/63 hdb: ATAPI 20X CD-ROM drive, 120kB Cache Uniform CDROM driver Revision: 2.54 hdc: ATAPI 6X CD-ROM DVD-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 768kB Cache Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 md driver 0.36.6 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8 scsi: <fdomain> Detection failed (no card) NCR53c406a: no available ports found sym53c416.c: Version 1.0.0 Failed initialization of WD-7000 SCSI card! EATA0: address 0x1f0 in use, skipping probe. EATA0: address 0x170 in use, skipping probe. DC390: 0 adapters found aec671x_detect: scsi : 0 hosts. scsi : detected total. Partition check: hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 > hda3 hda4 VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly. Freeing unused kernel memory: 124k freed NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0. Adding Swap: 32252k swap-space (priority -1) Serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A ttyS03 at 0x02e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California PPP: version 2.3.3 (demand dialling) PPP line discipline registered. registered device ppp0 PPP BSD Compression module registered PPP Deflate Compression module registered -- Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ICQ #8125618) Check out the Ultra programming language project! http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/