[luau] locking server

[R. Scott Belford]

On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 01:09 PM, MonMotha wrote:

> What tests did you run?  If you did the "all tests" (I think there's 12 
> of them), the last test is VERY thourough and should catch any memory 
> errors on the first go-around.  Barring that, it never hurts to run it 
> longer, but likely the ram is good if it can pass all the memtest86 
> tests.

All tests.  I was wary of the ram at one point, but, I trust the test.  
I'll be doing it again, though.  I never trust myself completely.

>
>>>
>>> Another thing that happened to someone recently was the motherboard 
>>> not setting the voltage correctlty with AUTO.  Forcing the voltage to 
>>> that in the spec sheets fixed his problems.
>> This will be investigated.  It seems like I couldn't get 30 days with 
>> bad voltage, but, perhaps this ultimately leads to suggestion 3, 
>> thermal shutdown.  I'll check.
>
> What processor is this again?  The Pentium 3 thermal shutdown is to 
> simply execute the HLT instruction, which would be like a hard lock, 
> though I believe it does throw an MCE jsut before that, which would 
> cause a kernel panic if MCE is enabled.

This is a dual athlon mp board.  Does it behave differently than the 
Pentium 3?
>
>>>
>>> This definately sounds like a hardware issue (possibly thermal 
>>> shutdown?).  Normally the kernel manages to at least throw up an Oops 
>>> on hardware failure, but occasionally hard locks are the result.  If 
>>> you can find something that reliably triggers the problem, you can go 
>>> a great way to diagnosing the cause.  Another possibility if it is 
>>> software is a problem in an interrupt handler or some other situation 
>>> where the kernel can't be interrupted but control is never returned 
>>> to the kernel by a driver.
>> I have theorized that my realtek ethernet chipset may be substandard 
>> for this application.  A freebsd friend pointed out that the author of 
>> the realtek driver for Freebsd made a few very negative comments about 
>> the quality of the chipset in his man pages.  He makes these two 
>> comments:
>
> snip comments re: realtek
>
>> The rl driver was written by Bill Paul <wpaul at ctr.columbia.edu>.
>> In your opinion, could this lead to a lock-down, and does realtek have 
>> that bad of a reputation in the Linux community?  It sounds pretty bad 
>> to me.
>
> The Linux community isn't usaully as in tune with the hardware gurus 
> (other than the driver developers themselves), but I have seen a few 
> gripes about the quality of the spec sheets (and the chip in general) 
> of the realtek 8139.  However, I've used those cards without incident 
> for years, acheiving uptimes of many months (power outages...).  
> However, depending on the application, you might want a nicer card like 
> a 3Com 3c905.

I too have a lot of them in use and have always thought it was a rather 
stable chip.  I chose to use it over the 3c905 for this reason.  Asus 
shipped this 3com nic with the motherboard.  Perhaps for a reason.  
Pending other information developments, I am quadrupling my file-max 
setting.  The extra 3com nic is strategy 2.

scott