Re: Simultaneous network/IDE traffic = reboot

M.Brands (shrike@il.fontys.nl)
Tue, 1 Jun 1999 00:14:05 +0200


On Mon, May 31, 1999 at 09:10:54PM +0200, Roland Olsson allegedly wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have stumbled upon a _big_ problem with my machine. It makes a silent
> and instantaneous soft reboot when performing (pretty tough) disk and
> network access at the same time. I noticed this when trying to transfer
> some 10+ Mb files from this machine as the screen just turned black and
> the BIOS "welcome" screen appeared. No kernel oops or other message,
> just a plain reboot. I can't find anything in the logs either. *sigh*
>
> If I am using the machine "normally" everything works just fine. That is
> no fiddling with large files or performing any extreme network activity.
>
> I have found a very simple way of reproducing the crash. Just do a 'ping
> -f' to the machine for a second or so and run 'hdparm -t /dev/hda' at
> the same time. It reboots almost immediately. One more thing, if I do
> 'ping -f' locally no matter to what address/if, I can't make it crash.
> But from another machine - reboot.
>
> I have checked everything I can think of, i.e. conflicting IRQ:s, DMA
> etc. I have tried to reassign almost everything in the BIOS but to no
> avail. Also tested the 2.2.9 kernel but same thing there. I do not know
> what to do next, does anyone of you have an idea?
>
> Some facts about the machine:
> Intel Celeron 333
> 128Mb DIMM
> Motherboard Abit BH6 (Award BIOS rev 4.51PG)
> 2pcs NIC 3Com 3C905B-TX
> Seagate Medalist ST38420A IDE 8,6Gb
> Redhat 6.0 (kernel build 2.2.5-15)

Wild guess: problems with the powersupply. Why do I think this? Because
generating massive amounts of networktraffic via the loopback doesn't
generate the same result.

I have the following machine and use it as a NFS server:

Celeron 300 (oc to 450 MHz)
128 MB
Abit BH6
2 * Digital DE500-BA (21143 chipset)
2 * Maxtor DiamondMax 8.4 GB EIDE (running in RAID0 configuration)
Acer 10X CD-ROM (EIDE)
Panasonic cheap-ass burner (via NCR 810 SCSI controller)
235 watt powersupply
2.2.6 kernel

I tested this system some time ago with a K6-200 (also with a DE500
NIC). I got a NFS performance of about 4.5 MB/sec (regular userland
NFS) even while burning a CD. One NIC is connected to my cable-modem,
the other to the K6 (100baseTX-FD). No instability whatsoever. The
Maxtor disks transfer 11-14 MB/sec (across the entire surface) and the
RAID0 stripset does about 20-21 MB/sec. Somehow I don't think it's
Linux, but I could be wrong.

Mathijs

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