Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 29 Jul 1998 14:40:32 +0200 (CEST) | From | MOLNAR Ingo <> | Subject | Re: Corruption Stats (fwd) |
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On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Mark Lord wrote:
> This one is another SMP motherboard. > > I wonder if there are any non-SMP reports at all?
now i will describe some strange case which probably will not help resolve the problem, but shows how closely 'hardware bugs getting triggered' and 'IDE' are related.
i have an SMP motherboard with one DIMM that i know is from a shitty manufacturer. Now while another module gets shipped i'm using this module, and it's usually not causing problems.
under very heavy (artificial) load, i can reliably make my system fail, it repeatedly fails to release a very important irq spinlock, causing a hard hang. The case where this happens is _always_ when an (arbitrary) interrupt hits us after ide.c's ide__sti() in ide.c:start_request().
this is not useful to you, as i _know_ the RAM module is shitty (the failure speed is dependent on the temperature in the room, say late at night it fails only after 1 hour of stress-testing, at noon it fails within 30 seconds). The thing to learn here is that the IDE subsystem hits the memory subsystem the hardest way in this system. Yes i have a networking card too and a quite complex SCSI setup.
i've been hunting this for 2 days (it was so reliably happening in ide.c that i suspected some software IDE problem), but it's the RAM module getting hit in a weird way.
the system is a BX dual-PII, SCSI: 1x ncr875 2 disks, 1x ncr810 1 disk, IDE: PIIX4 _PIO_ mode4 1 disk. (2.1.111)
-- mingo
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