*BSD News Article 92789


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From: Tony Griffiths <tonyg@OntheNet.com.au>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Adaptec 2940 bug fix
Date: Sat, 05 Apr 1997 11:03:09 +1000
Organization: On the Net (ISP on the Gold Coast, Australia)
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To: Paul Young <phy@xnet.com>
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38453

Paul Young wrote:
> 
> Hi -
> 
> The release notes for 2.2.1 mentions a bug in the
> driver for the AHA-2940 SCSI controller which was fixed.
> I'd like to find out if this is causing my current problems, and
> if I should upgrade.
> What I'm seeing is that a 'make world' on 2.1.[67] keeps crashing
> with corrupted source files - where a few characters get lost or
> jumbled. What's strange is that the files are fine a few minutes later,
> as if the buffer cache was getting stomped on.
> I'm also seeing occasional crashes during the compile, but it gets
> stuck trying to save the dump file.
> 
> Could this be the problem that is fixed for 2.2.1?

We (On the Net) picked up a second-hand DEC Prioris server box which
contains a 2940 SCSI adapter.  I too had problems with 2.1.7 and 2.2
with corrupted files when building a kernel along with several crashes.

I eventually installed 2.1.7.1 and the machines was much more stable
but still managed to crash several times a day.  After further
investigation, I tracked it down to a bad memory SIMM.  Since this
memory was replaced, the machine has worked fine.

Now I don't know whether the original problems I was having
(corruption/crashes) wern't entirely due to this bad RAM module!

While I'm happy with 2.1.7.1, I originally punted for 2.2 because it
has the noatime (no access time) switch to mount and since the machine
is a cacheing proxy server with > 200,000 files in the cache, reducing
filesystem I/O is a top priority!

At a guess, I would say to definitely upgrade to 2.1.7.1 or go directly
to the 2.2.1 release...

Tony