Date: Thu, 05 Nov 1998 17:56:44 -0800 From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> To: Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Grrr... calcru: negative time blah blah blah Message-ID: <199811060156.RAA01542@dingo.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 05 Nov 1998 19:24:54 EST." <199811060024.TAA14156@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
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> Recently, the EE department got a bunch of new Dell machines with > 450Mhz PII CPUs. This one particular system is an SMP box with 512MB > of RAM and a 3D Labs Fire GL 100 <mumble> adapter. Somebody installed > FreeBSD 3.0-RELEASE on this system (my brainwashing scheme is working! > Soon I will rule the wor--! Uh, wait. You didn't hear that.) and > discovered that this display adapter isn't supported by XFree86 (yet) > so they downloaded the XFCom_3DLabs server from somewhere. > > The system seems to run fin until they start this X server. The > server loads, but it does something unfriendly to the system that > produces the following errors: > > calcru: negative time of -36857 usec for pid 4036 (csh) > calcru: negative time of -51744 usec for pid 4043 (w) > calcru: negative time of -26704 usec for pid 4044 (ps) > calcru: negative time of -47557 usec for pid 4046 (reboot) > calcru: negative time of -46489 usec for pid 304 (hostname) > calcru: negative time of -24935 usec for pid 310 (ps) > > Also, the system becomes really slow at this point: keystrokes > are echoed on the console very slowly. Naturally, there's no source > for the XFCom_3DLabs X server. Sounds like it's starting an interrupt storm. > I built a kernel from the 3.0-19981103-SNAP distribution: this > changes the behavior slightly in that the calcru messages no longer > appear, however the X server crashes shortly after startup: > > pid 254 (XFCom_3DLabs), uid 0: exited on signal 6 (core dumped) > > And the system once again feels very slow and sluggish. This slowness > doesn't go away until the system is rebooted. Definitely sounds like the card is generating endless interrupts. Can you turn interrupts off on the card? (I doubt it.) Any chance of an Xi server for this card? > I know this has been talked about before. This problem is 100% > reproducible with this X server. It happens with both an SMP kernel > and a UP kernel on the same hardware. Anybody have any clues how > to go about tracking this down? Check the system stats for interrupt counts. > Anyway. If anyone has any clues as to how to deal with this problem, > I'd love to hear of it. We may be stuck with these cards, and the > Powers That Be (tm) want to use FreeBSD on these systems for a course; > I'd hate to have to tell them that they'll have to make due with console > only mode. Tell the Powers that they may want to consider more sensible video cards; you want good *2d* performance for X, not 3d. -- \\ Sometimes you're ahead, \\ Mike Smith \\ sometimes you're behind. \\ mike@smith.net.au \\ The race is long, and in the \\ msmith@freebsd.org \\ end it's only with yourself. \\ msmith@cdrom.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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