On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Pascal A. Dupuis wrote:
> Hello,
> I've got some mysterious crashes, without any message in the syslog. Total
> freeze, no keyboard, no network whatsoever. Just the reset button, and
> then 10 minutes delay before disks are checked.
I had a similar problem (except the software watchdog was obviously still
functional as the system automatically rebooted about 30 seconds later)
> The kernel : stock 2.1.128
The same...
> compiled with pgcc, based upon egcs-1.0.3 and -O6: instant freeze
> same compiler, -O6 and arch/kernel/time.c with -O2 : freeze after
> mounting the swap file
> compiled with gcc-2.8.1, -O2 : seems OK
I'm using egcs-2.91.58 (19981101) with only the architecture flags added
(-mpentium -mcpu=pentium -march=pentium) - the regular 586 flags (-O2 et al)
are carried across still - I steer clear of crazy optimization levels :)
> The circumstances :
> - starting netscape (I get the main window, and bang!)
When it did it to me just then, I typed "C-x C-f" in the Netscape
(Navigator 4.5) window instead of the Emacs window. Instant freeze.
I could ping the system from another host, but could not telnet in.
About half an hour prior to this, I had noticed the system getting a tad
sluggish, although there was nothing out of the ordinary happening.
I noticed a post earlier by H. J. Lu where he questioned scheduling - I had
some similar symptoms happen earlier today also - a large disk write pretty
much turned the box into a single-tasking system ;) All other disk i/o
queued until the large one was over. Usually things tend to share around
equally.
Just as a general observance, all post-2.1.125 kernels appear to be living
up to the development kernel inference of instability. 117/9 and 125 were fine.
I'm also willing to bet that egcs is the problem - its pentium optimisations
are probably generating some unwanted/unexpected opcodes. Wish I knew enough
AT&T syntax to figure it out.
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