We seem to be trying to accumulate experience. So I've included a
message I sent to the Red Hat mailing list in November. But first,
some more recent notes.
A day or so ago, I installed a virgin 2.2.14 kernel and started
running two copies of a program that hits the integer part of the CPU
pretty hard. It appears to mostly live within the L1 cache, so the
rest of the system gets a rest.
Does anyone know if the IDE patches
http://linux.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedrick/ide.2.2.14.20000107.patch.gz
fix bugs? I know it adds features such as support for the HPT IDE
controler (but I'm not going to use it anyway).
My system hasn't been too unstable, but then I've used it very little.
Just before upgrading to 2.2.14, I had a program lock up when it tried
to touch /dev/fd0. INTR and QUIT and other kills didn't touch it. In
fact, when I did an strace on it, the strace program locked up
similarly! When I tried to do a shutdown, it too froze during NFS
unmounting. Very odd.
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat Jan 8 22:27:27 2000
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1999 14:42:58 -0500 (EST)
From: "D. Hugh Redelmeier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc: Redhat Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Lost interrupt on BP6 SMP with IDE hard disks [was: Lost Inturrupt?]
| From: Robert A. Hayden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| I have a new dual-celeron 550 system I just got running with a Abit BP6
| motherboard and two IBM IDE Hard drives attached to the 33mb chain. I am
| using Redhat 6.0 as my base due to difficulties with getting 6.1 to
| install.
Interesting. I have a BP6 with two C300a CPUs, overclocked to 450
(considered pretty safe), and an IBM 13G 7200 RPM drive. It has been
installed and running for a couple of months with RH6.0, but I haven't
put it into service for various reasons.
Anyway, a couple of days ago, I heard the HD spin down and up again.
When I looked on the console, I saw "hda: lost interrupt". This is
from memory because I didn't see it in /var/log/messages.
Since then, I've put heat-sink compound (AKA thermal grease) on the BX
chip (as recommended by many bp6 sources -- see www.bp6.com). And, as
I type this, I'm loading RH6.1 (with updates).
The linux-kernel mailing lists have reported problems with ide VS smp
in 2.2.12 at least. I'm not sure when those problems showed up, nor
an I sure that they are fixed now; most likely they are present in the
kernels shipped with RH6.0 and RH6.1. Red Hat has not released an
update for the kernel in RH6.1, and the stock kernels are different
from Red Hat's in ways that I haven't investigated (I suspect that Red
Hat's has some value added by A. Cox). Summary: I'm confused and
awaiting dust to settle, but I'm not sure that I'll know when that has
happened.
You should now be able to infer a couple of reasons that I have not
put my system into service.
Hugh Redelmeier
[EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: +1 416 482-8253
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