Date: Mon, 29 Sep 1997 22:03:03 -0700 From: "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> To: Tom <tom@sdf.com> Cc: Tony Kimball <Anthony.Kimball@east.sun.com>, freebsd-chat@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: supermicro p6sns/p6sas Message-ID: <199709300503.WAA12579@MindBender.serv.net> In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 29 Sep 97 21:01:08 -0700. <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970929205250.5247A-100000@misery.sdf.com>
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[...]
>> means loss of life/limb/property. Wasted time is one form of partial
>> loss of life, and certainly having to type 'make world' again is a
>> waste of time, but a floating-point error in an embedded system could
> Waste of time? A little more than that. A make world would NOT EVER
>complete on such a CPU. DG has demonstrated this bug, and described it to
>the list. He has a K6 that will not complete a make world ever. At the
>time, he could not even return it.
It's important to remember that sig-11's and other such failures
during make worlds are not the problem, but the symptom that there are
serious problems.
The build errors show up there because it's highly visible. What you
don't see for every visible failure are potentially incorrect opcodes
being written to object files, potential mis-fetched VM pages
resulting in panics or crashes, possibly only after seriously
corrupting a database or your filesystem, or other such creeping-
death problems.
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Michael L. VanLoon michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
Contract software development for Windows NT, Windows 95 and Unix.
Windows NT and Unix server development in C++ and C.
--< Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x >--
NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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