Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!crcnis1.unl.edu!wupost!cs.utexas.edu!natinst.com!hrd769.brooks.af.mil!hrd769.brooks.af.mil!not-for-mail
From: burgess@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (Dave Burgess)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Sorry, I lost the 'drive light on and locked' patch.
Date: 20 Jul 1993 04:16:43 -0500
Organization: Armstrong Laboratory, Brooks AFB, TX
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <22gd69$6j3@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hrd769.brooks.af.mil
There was some discussion about three weeks ago about the system hang
where the hard drive locks up with the the drive light lit. Someone,
whose name I have regretfully forgotten, posted either a description of
a change that (s)he had made to the system that reset the drive.
In case I dreamed it (which has happened more than once), I propose a
simple solution (sweets from the sweet :-).
On a disk {read,select} start up an alarm that times out in three
seconds. On a successful operation from the disk, clear the alarm.
When the alarm expires, that means that no disk activity has succeeded
in the last three seconds, which would seem to me to be a good indicator
that the drive/controller has siezed up again. My guess on the true
cause is that the bde's intr code makes the machine too fast for the
controller to keep up (THERE'S a mixed blessing).
Note: I am using the current-sources from sun-lamp using sup. I
am trying to get the system up to date (the executables, et al)
compiling gcc2 (which succeeded), the lib sources (which worked fine
under gcc1, but failed under gcc2), then the bin source (sh locks up the
hard drive)....
The hard drive locking up (it seems to me) is the most important thing I
can fix right now. The drive does not fail like this with the 0.8
released kernel, or from the sources that came out with the original 0.8
release.
--
------
TSgt Dave Burgess
NCOIC AL/Management Information Systems Office
Brooks AFB, TX