*BSD News Article 11432


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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!gemini.oscs.montana.edu!opjnw
From: opjnw@gemini.oscs.montana.edu (Nathan Williams)
Subject: Re: bad crashes w/ 386bsd
Message-ID: <1993Feb22.012232.24154@coe.montana.edu>
Keywords: n
Sender: usenet@coe.montana.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Montana State University
References: <8fVlfba00WBME6YGZo@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1993 01:22:32 GMT
Lines: 66

In article <8fVlfba00WBME6YGZo@andrew.cmu.edu> aw2t+@andrew.cmu.edu (Alex R.N. Wetmore) writes:
>I have been having a lot of bad crashes recently (basicially since I
>installed PatchKit 0.2).  There seem to be two types of crashes:
>
>1) The file system dies.  Programs that are running keep running, but as
>soon as they access the filesystem they block forever.  I can reboot the
>machine w/ the 3 finger salute, so I usually do that.  Usually I loose a
>few of the most recently accessed files (one of which is the user file
>for my bbs, which sucks).
>
>I assume that the first one is related to the wd.c driver, but I haven't
>seen any replacements that address this issue.  

Try looking at the barsoom driver's (or variants) that are located on
ref.  


>2) Everything just dies.  I can usuaully switch virtual consoles and
>give it the 3 finger salute, but not much more.

I would suspect that #2 is directly related to 
>  5 meg swap


Try increasing your swap space.  5 Meg isn't much, and 386BSD doesn't
do well when it starts to swap alot (though it doesn't make multiple
copies of the same file and the same name like another PD O.S. :-)


It's possible that some of the VM fixes are triggering some bad
hardware in your machine...

>Normally I can live with a crash after
>two days of uptime (just get into the habit of rebooting daily), but
>recently things have started crashing a few times a day (about 50% of
>each type).  Today the file system crashed so hard that I lost my
>bootblock (and had to spend a few hours learning how to reinstall them
>w/ disklabel).
>

That sounds like my machine BEFORE the patchkit.  Now, after the 0.2.1
patchkit, my machine has been up for a week at one time (needed to
reboot to try out some kernel patches).

I have only seen one crash since installing the patchkit, and I was
at home when it happened so the message was lost when it rebooted.

>Looking through the
>386bsd.BUGS list it seems they mention some scheduling problems that
>sound like they could be causing the crashes too.  I haven't seen any
>patches for that code outside of the patchkit though.  Anything I can do
>about this?
>

0.2 is supposedly the fix for this, when it is released.



Don't know if that helped, 

Nate
-- 
osynw@terra.oscs.montana.edu |  Still trying to find a good reason for
nate@cs.montana.edu          |  these 'computer' things.  Personally,
work #: (406) 994-4836       |  I don't think they'll catch on - 
home #: (406) 586-0579       |                            Don Hammerstrom