I've been getting mysterious hangs whenever I bang *hard* on the disk
(e.g. when I take 30+Mb of stuff and crunch it down into 8 floppy
images...). This is, to say the least, annoying.
I've seen this mainly on the IDE disk (e.g. moving stuff to the SCSI
disk often alleviates the problem), but I coulda sworn I saw it once or
twice when I've been just banging on the SCSI disk.
The system doesn't *completely* hang; I can do things that don't use
the affected drive. Anything that does (including a sync) hangs forever.
Hitting SHIFT+SCROLLOCK when this happens reveals that in every case
there is exactly *one* buffer that's locked... so I think there's either
a deadlock or some code path that's not releasing a buffer when it
should... I'm not sure this is an Alpha-specific problem either...
I backtracked through David M-T's wonderful collection of prebuilt
kernels; the problem doesn't appear in 1.3.27 but does appear in 1.3.31
and later (I've tried all the way through .36). I suppose I could
look at the diffs, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas off
the top of their head...
Thanks!
-- Jim Paradis (paradis@amt.tay1.dec.com) "It's not procrastination, Digital Equipment Corporation it's my new Just-In-Time (508)952-4047 Workload Management System!"