Messages in this thread |  | | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: 2.4. continues after Aieee... | Date | Thu, 16 Nov 2000 11:20:30 +0000 (GMT) |
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Rogier Wolff wrote: > Dennis wrote: > > network card driver) and leave the system running make linux unusable in > > unattended environments as the machine is functionally dead. > > Which doesn't help in this case, as your network card COULD be dead, > while the system simply hasn't crashed....
Not every case causes a panic either. This week, I had an instance of an i686 box lock solid with a DFE-530TX net card. Rebooting/power cycling it didn't recover it (despite it working for the past month without any problems). It only started working again after I moved it into a different PCI slot.
I've seen a couple of instances now on totally different hardware where it is possible to lock a PCI bus solid by improper connections on some of the PCI bus lines, so a faulty PCI socket seem to be the most likely cause.
In this case, a "panic" doesn't help you; the machine experiances a hardware lockup. To catch these, you'd need a hardware watchdog.
What I'm basically saying is that there is only a limited amount that Linux (or any OS) can do against these types of hardware failure. If you need better protection, try a hardware with user-space policy implementations. _____ |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+- | | Russell King rmk@arm.linux.org.uk --- --- | | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html / / | | +-+-+ --- -+- / | THE developer of ARM Linux |+| /|\ / | | | --- | +-+-+ ------------------------------------------------- /\\\ | - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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