Re: The stability crisis

Matthew Vanecek (mev0003@unt.edu)
Thu, 01 Jul 1999 11:04:42 -0500

Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
>
> I think the problem may have something to do with the size of the oops
> information and how much is left on the screen. I am doing Alpha
> development here, and virtually every oops I get a) double oopses and b)
> leaves no traces in dmesg or the log. In this situation, the first oops
> is long gone before I can even see it, and the second one is more than
> half gone by the time it's done, which means what I see on the screen is
> close to useless. At present this is not a sufficiently critical issue
> for us that we need to dive in and debug them, and when it becomes one I
> suspect we'll wire up the serial line for a more persistent tracking
> device (like a serial printer, a la Ingo's suggestion elsewhere on this
> list).
>
> Just my $.02, and only for a part of the issues Linus notes.
>
> Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > So why didn't you even include a ksymoops version of the crash? Or a good
> > hardware description? People do try to follow it, but it's not as if I've
> > seen very good reports even from people who say it's obviously bad. And

That's pretty much been my experience. 2.2.10 crashes on a regular
basis. Certainly more than previous kernels. Why? Who's to say? It
leaves behind no information. Nothing in the logs, nothing in dmesg
(which changes with each boot up, anyhow). There's no way to try the
magic SysRq key, as the keyboard is completely locked up. I can't
telnet/ssh/ftp/ping the box, as it evidently stops processing all
network requests. In short, there is absolutely no indication, not the
slightest oops or byte left over, to even begin to give the inkling of a
clue about why the system crashed. So how do you debug that? I don't
even know how to cause the crash; usually i get up in the morning, or
come home from work, to find the machine all locked up.

This particular machine is an AMD K6-2/350 *not* OC'ed, 64M Ram, Asus
P5A mobo, Buslogic BT-932 with a 4.5 Seagate, 24x Panasonic, and a JVC
2010 clone CDR, with a NetGear FA310TX (new one) nic, and an SiS 6326
video card. I use Redhat 6.0, fixed. Currently, I have X (SVGA),
Window Maker 0.60.0 (I upgraded, in case it was WM causing lockups),
Samba 2.0.4b, knfsd 1.3.2, and my gnome is custom compiled.

OTOH, my masq machine doesn't crash. It's a little 486/120 w/32M Ram,
mobo unknown, running a D-Link 220 NIC, an SIIG (Promise chipset) EIDE
controller card, an Orchid Fahrenheit video card (rarely used), and a
Zoom modem. With the exception or X programs, it's got the same
software as my workstation, RH 6.0, samba, knfsd, etc. Just no X.

I suffer, and hope that 2.2.11 will solve my problems with my WS.

-- 
Matthew Vanecek
Course of Study: http://www.unt.edu/bcis
Visit my Website at http://people.unt.edu/~mev0003
For answers type: perl -e 'print
$i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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