2.4.17 freezes

2.4.17 freezes

[Robin Farine]

Hi,

The mailing-list archive contains some reports of 2.4.17 freezes or
crashes in the context of specific hardware configuration, such as
SCSI+ATA and UDMA66 or RAID. In my office however, I had three PCs
running 2.4.17 from the Debian woody distribution, all of them
PentiumIII 82371AB PIIX4 chipset but otherwise without anything fancy.

One of those PCs has a SCSI DAT connected to its motherboard builtin
Adaptec aic7890 SCSI adapter. This PC runs Amanda to backup the three
PCs 2 times a week on a 10Mbits half-duplex LAN.

Everytime amanda ran (under 2.4.17), at least one of the PCs froze
completely (without any trace in the logs): unreachable through network,
black screen and no keyboard response. And sometimes, one of them froze
during normal day usage.

First, I thought of an ATA DMA or SCSI problem and thus configured one
of the PCs' ATA interface in default PIO, 16 bits transfers mode. It
froze as well.

Hope this can help tracking the problem down or at least save some time
to people with a similar situation,

Robin

Re: 2.4.17 freezes

[Matti Aarnio]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 02:37:12PM +0100, Robin Farine wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The mailing-list archive contains some reports of 2.4.17 freezes or
> crashes in the context of specific hardware configuration, such as
> SCSI+ATA and UDMA66 or RAID. In my office however, I had three PCs
> running 2.4.17 from the Debian woody distribution, all of them
> PentiumIII 82371AB PIIX4 chipset but otherwise without anything fancy.

  The freezing machines all have RAID-1 and fast CPUs and a lot
  (500-1000 MB) memory ?  .. and are SMP ?
... 
> Hope this can help tracking the problem down or at least save some time
> to people with a similar situation,

  I reported on this two months ago, and a month ago I figured out
  that non-SMP kernel works just fine (although the other CPU
  at my SMP machine now idles...)

  Since then I have had to move the machine into location where
  I can't poke at it daily, and thus I can't test the thing now.

> Robin

/Matti Aarnio

Re: 2.4.17 freezes

[Robin Farine]

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 16:13, Matti Aarnio wrote:

[snip]

> 
>   The freezing machines all have RAID-1 and fast CPUs and a lot
>   (500-1000 MB) memory ?  .. and are SMP ?
> ... 

No, basic hardware configurations (no RAID, no SMP):
        *  450Mzh Pentium III (512KB L2 cache), 64MB SDRAM
        *  450Mzh Pentium III (512KB L2 cache), 256MB SDRAM
        *  650Mzh Pentium III (256KB L2 cache), 256MB SDRAM

[snip]

> /Matti Aarnio

Robin

Re: 2.4.17 freezes

[Matti Aarnio]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 04:53:12PM +0100, Robin Farine wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 16:13, Matti Aarnio wrote:
> [snip]
> >   The freezing machines all have RAID-1 and fast CPUs and a lot
> >   (500-1000 MB) memory ?  .. and are SMP ?
> > ... 
> 
> No, basic hardware configurations (no RAID, no SMP):
>         *  450Mzh Pentium III (512KB L2 cache), 64MB SDRAM
>         *  450Mzh Pentium III (512KB L2 cache), 256MB SDRAM
>         *  650Mzh Pentium III (256KB L2 cache), 256MB SDRAM
> 
> [snip]

   Huh ?   EXT3 ?

> > /Matti Aarnio
> Robin

/Matti Aarnio

Re: 2.4.17 freezes

[Robin Farine]

On Thu, 2002-02-07 at 17:03, Matti Aarnio wrote:

[snip]

> 
>    Huh ?   EXT3 ?
> 

No, no :) plain old ext2.

[snip]

> /Matti Aarnio

Robin