Hi,
recently I made a kernel update to 2.2.9 and everything went fine.
Very recently I plugged in a second CPU (P II 400, Soltek 68A board),
recompiled the kernel with SMP and end up with an unstable system.
The system boots okay, I could even start KDE and all that nice toys.
But after a while (typically some minutes, sometimes shorter) the
system freezes suddenly during various I/O operations (e.g. writing to
floppy, "find / ..." was a �reliable� candidate to initiate this crash).
It really dies (no access over LAN, no CTRL-ALT-...) - fortunately my
box has a RESET button...
I tried something (stupid, forget about that). I even applied an
�unofficial� patch by Andrea Arcangeli ("22-irq-2.2.9.patch") without
solving the problem. Then I remembered something from the �kernel patch
summaries� for 2.2.9: "...you may want to disable ... bdflush ...".
Well, I had no problems with bdflush (/sbin/update) running 2.2.9
without SMP. Nevertheless, I canceled the start of the update daemon
and - to my surprise - the system is running stable. As a cross check,
I switched it on again - and was badly punished (freezing during start
of KDE resulting in a corrupted /home file system). After some
�repairing� I disabled bdflush again and enjoy SMP.
Obviously, I _have_ to disable the bdflush daemon.
Did anyone else observe such a �sudden death� ?
Regards to all Symmetric Multi Players,
Olaf Knospe.
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