From owner-freebsd-ppc@FreeBSD.ORG Sun Jul 10 23:27:44 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8F98A16A41C; Sun, 10 Jul 2005 23:27:44 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from smtp3.server.rpi.edu (smtp3.server.rpi.edu [128.113.2.3]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0AD2C43D46; Sun, 10 Jul 2005 23:27:43 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by smtp3.server.rpi.edu (8.13.0/8.13.0) with ESMTP id j6ANRex4001793; Sun, 10 Jul 2005 19:27:42 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <9F1F43A3-AD10-41CC-BD11-EF912D232D6B@orthanc.ca> References: <42CEF70A.2060605@freebsd.org> <20050709000616.22155977.torfinn.ingolfsen@broadpark.no> <20050708230454.GA4742@dragon.NUXI.org> <42CF1B91.2090902@freebsd.org> <9F1F43A3-AD10-41CC-BD11-EF912D232D6B@orthanc.ca> Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 19:27:39 -0400 To: Lyndon Nerenberg , Peter Grehan From: Garance A Drosihn Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-CanItPRO-Stream: default X-RPI-SA-Score: undef - spam-scanning disabled X-Scanned-By: CanIt (www . canit . ca) on 128.113.2.3 Cc: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Duty-cycle on mini's (was Re: Compiler patches ...) X-BeenThere: freebsd-ppc@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting FreeBSD to the PowerPC List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2005 23:27:44 -0000 At 1:00 AM -0700 7/10/05, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote: >>>Are they really designed to run at full bore at the time? >> >>You'd hope so, and that the fans blowing full speed would allow >>this to be the case. I've not had this happen on mine, so perhaps >>it's a ventilation issue ? > >I can't speak to "designed" for flat-out operation, but my mini >runs 24x7 without complaint. The background for some of this discussion is that my Mac-mini died after running FreeBSD for about five months. During that time, the machine was up 24x7 except for a few days in February and March. I'll guess that 98% of the time that it was running, it was running FreeBSD/PPC. The other 2% was running MacOS 10. The symptom I saw was that the mini would start up okay, and then after some amount of time it acted like the hard disk had been disconnected. Needless to say, the machine couldn't do much after the hard disk disappeared. If I just-rebooted the machine at that point, then even open-firmware could not find the hard disk. If I powered it down and waited an hour or so, then it would boot up fine. Initially the problem only happened on FreeBSD/PPC, but within a week it was also happening quite regularly on MacOS 10. So, several people (including me) wonder if maybe FreeBSD was doing something wrong with the fans. Either running them too much, or not enough, or something else. Two important notes on this failure: 1) RPI has spells where the air-conditioning to offices in the computer center doesn't work well. At the time of the failure, my office had been between 80 and 85 Fahrenheit for a few days straight. (this is partially because I have eight computers, two UPS's, and a refrigerator in here...). 2) When I bought it in to be fixed, the guy at the Apple store said he had seen a few similar failures -- and none of those were running FreeBSD. But he hadn't seen all *that* many failures. I had the impression they had seen between five and ten. Whatever the problem was, Apple was able to fix it without replacing the hard drive or the motherboard. The mac-mini has been working fine for me since then. I have the vague feeling that the fans seem to run a bit more now than they used to, but I can't say that I was ever really paying all that much attention to them. So, I wouldn't read too much into the failure of this one Mac-mini, but it would be interesting to hear if anyone else has a similar problem. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu