Messages in this thread |  | | From | (G.W. Wettstein) | Date | Fri, 20 Sep 1996 07:15:13 CDT | Subject | Re: Bad news |
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On Sep 20, 12:45am, Boris Tobotras wrote:
} Subject: Bad news
Good morning to Boris and everyone else on the list. Hopefully this note finds your end of the week going well.
> Hi, > > yes, there are bad news for me :( > > I tried 1.2.13, kernel `scsi' from slackware 3.0. Runs eight > parallel crashmes without any fault. Rebooted then into 2.0.20 with > this configuration:
... [ Configuration file deleted. ] ...
> (all other is 'N'). crashme OOPSes and reboots immediately, so > I can't even write down OOPS sympthoms. And it is with slowest chipset > settings, and 1.2.13 was with fastest. I have absolutely no idea what > to do further. I'm just sure it _is_ a software bug somewhere in > kernel...
I can perhaps add a comment which may or may not be helpful to this discussion. The pharmacy in the Cancer Center has been supported for almost 5 years on an old workhorse. This machine is an early Gateway-2K 80386dx with 16Mbyte of memory.
The performance of this machine under 1.2.13 was phenomenal. In fact it was this machine that was pushing 1 year of uptime with a total process count of well over 3 million. I had posted a note to this list when the machine rolled over the 1 million process mark. This machine ran X about 18 hours a day, pushed three printers and handled about 3-4 logins running our clinic support software. Never heard as much as a peep out of the machine.
I kicked up 2.0.10 on the machine shortly after it came out. The performance of this kernel was of course markedly superior to when the machine was running 1.2.13. The problem we began to notice was that certain of our resource hungry processes began to fault. As long as the machine is under moderate load there is no problem. As memory utilization and load increases we began to see occassional erratic behavior. Totally reproducible. Performance with 1.2.13 is unchanged.
I attributed this to the fact that the 2.0.x series is simply pushing the hardware closer to the limits of its performance. The machine is scheduled to come off-line and be retired to more sedentary uses so I have not been too concerned about this.
The above comments are of course far from scientific but hopefully a useful datapoint. I have long been under the suspicion that we may flush out really marginal hardware as we push the performance envelope of the architecture.
I hope that Boris doesn't interpret this as an attack on his hardware. I just wanted to offer a datapoint that there is evidence for a machine that functions flawlessly with 1.2.13 but not with the 2.0.x series.
Have a pleasant weekend everyone.
Greg
}-- End of excerpt from Boris Tobotras
As always, Dr. G.W. Wettstein Velocity, LLC - Specialists in leveraging 4206 N. 19th Ave. inter-networking technology for enterprise groups. Fargo, ND 58102 INTERNET: greg@wind.rmcc.com Phone: 701-281-1686 INTERNET: greg@wind.enjellic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "According to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized." -- Terry Pratchett Interesting Times
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