Re: Linux w/XFS on Athlon systems

[Seth Mos <knuffie@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 13:29 6-12-2001 -0800, Gabe E. Nydick wrote:
> Seth,
>
>     The system we have works fine with 1000 simultaneous bonnie++ processes
> running under a PIII kernel.  Do you think it could still be the memory?

I had one system with 64 MB of ram of which about 1 was faulty. Sometimes 
it booted. It died at various places. corrupted some files crashed some 
processes, some stuck in D state, hanging kupdate, oopses, panics. I had 
seen about every error known to man in about 2 hours untill I removed one 
of the dims and everything was well.

That was 4 months ago. The machine is still running to this date and has 
never crashed _once_ since that time or even give any form of trouble.

Bonnie excercises disk. The Bonnie proces stays in RAM and your disk cache 
might wander right over the bad piece of ram without crashing the kernel. 
You enable the Athlon option, it reorganizes some ways of reading and 
writing to the ram to speed it up and suddenly the kernel code is trying to 
use the faulty ram. Seems plausible to me.

Did you enable mtrr by any chance? I could make a Eicon Diva server card 
stop working by enabling or disabling mtrr. Because of remapping some 
buffers and PCI ports the driver was not the same spot where the driver 
thought it should have been.


--
Seth
Every program has two purposes one for which
it was written and another for which it wasn't
I use the last kind.