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#! rnews 1605 bsd Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!news.sandia.gov!sargon.mdl.sandia.gov!aflundi From: aflundi@mdl.sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin) Subject: Why do disk transfers lockup my machine? Message-ID: <1996Jan9.160757.19783@mdl.sandia.gov> Reply-To: aflundi@sandia.gov (Alan F Lundin) Organization: MDL, Sandia National Labs., Albuquerque, NM Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 16:07:57 GMT Lines: 30 Hi Guys, I have a quick question. I have a machine at home that has a ISA bus motherboard and a 1542B SCSI controller that locks up while I do disk operations, but returns to normal afterword. For instance, I decided to look at the xperimnt stuff and did $ gzcat xperimnt.tgz | tar xvf - which worked feverishly away, displaying the tar output in the window I kicked it off in. However, the other processes (window manager, xterms, shells, etc.) just couldn't get their share of the CPU. The mouse cursor, for instance, would move only every several minutes, one movement at a time. So as a result, the machine was unusable while the gzcat/untar command was executing. However, I tried the same things on my machine at work which has a Bt445S SCSI controller on a VLB motherboard without any similar lockup. In both cases, I wrote to a directory on the same disk I read from, and in both cases I was running 2.1R. Is there something funny about the 1542B controller that causes this? --alan -- Alan Lundin <aflundi@sandia.gov>