Date: Mon, 6 Dec 1999 11:05:18 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> To: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb@hub.freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PCI DMA lockups in 3.2 (3.3 maybe?) Message-ID: <199912061905.LAA71515@apollo.backplane.com> References: <19991205120428.E6F4514C3E@hub.freebsd.org>
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:
:[snip]
:> I am a good programmer and can fix things :-). But I've had to deal with
:> a number of nightmare situations by commercial entities deploying FreeBSD
:> and at least three (including one very recently) where commercial entities
:> have refused to upgrade past 2.2.x due to perceived stability problems.
:[snip]
:>
:> -Matt
:> Matthew Dillon
:
: we can not identify the specific problem from this message.
:without sufficient information to indentify and hopefully reproduce
:the problem, we can not address it. please provide this information
:if it is available to you. if it is not, please provide us contact
:information for the commercial entities experiencing the problem.
:
:jmb
First, the statement was anecdotal -- all of the problems have been
fixed in -current. Second, these people posted their questions and
problems on -hackers or -stable or -current and got not one useful
response, then came to me privately and asked for help. For you,
or anyone, to attempt to dismiss the statement by implying help after
the fact is bogus. This being a freeware development project it is
perfectly ok to say "I can't help" or "I don't have time". It is NOT
ok to imply help when none would otherwise be forthcoming.
Two commercial entities approached me on helping fix INN bugs. Those
turned out to be related to a VM/mmap bug (2.x, 3.x, 4.x), which I fixed
in 4.x, and a swap bug (2.x, 3.x) which I couldn't fix in 2.x or 3.x
but which was already fixed in 4.x by the rewrite of the swap code I
had done earlier in the year. This bug turned out to be a KVM
fragmentation problem due to the large linear arrays that 2.x and 3.x
allocate for swap metadata. I had another commercial entity approach
me in regards to dealing with low-memory lockup problems which, again,
I was unable to completely fix in 3.x but was able to fix in 4.x because
of the getnewbuf() rewrite. I had another commercial entity approach me
in regards to the ps/procfs problem (before Poul went on his procfs
rampage) and I gave that person the workaround I used at BEST, which is
simply to flock() around the procfs code in /bin/ps to force serialization.
That's just the recent stuff, off the top of my head.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@backplane.com>
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