From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Dec 5 11:43:50 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from screech.weirdnoise.com (209-128-78-198.bayarea.net [209.128.78.198]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 47F9A1544B; Sun, 5 Dec 1999 11:43:46 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from edhall@screech.weirdnoise.com) Received: from screech.weirdnoise.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by screech.weirdnoise.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id LAA17720; Sun, 5 Dec 1999 11:44:58 -0800 Message-Id: <199912051944.LAA17720@screech.weirdnoise.com> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 To: "Jonathan M. Bresler" Cc: dillon@apollo.backplane.com, kris@hub.freebsd.org, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PCI DMA lockups in 3.2 (3.3 maybe?) In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 05 Dec 1999 04:04:28 PST." <19991205120428.E6F4514C3E@hub.freebsd.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 05 Dec 1999 11:44:57 -0800 From: Ed Hall Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG You write: : 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. I work at Yahoo. My address there is "edhall@yahoo-inc.com". On a recent project I encountered two show-stopping bugs with 3.3-release that did not exist in 2.2.8-release: 1) Random crashes in FXP interrupt or low-level IP code. Something is clobbering the kernel stack--possibly the NCR driver, since using an Adaptec made the problem stop, as did a backport of the CAM driver Peter Wemm tried. This was on an N440BX, which is becoming quite common in server applications. Other installations are apparantly seeing the same problem on this hardware. 2) A hard loop in the pagedaemon. This was especially egregious, since it meant the system had to be rebooted from the console--and since the application could elicit the problem within a few minutes. Disabling the use of mmap() for file update in the application prevented the problem. After spending a day trying to cook up a test program that elicited the same behavior that the application did, I gave up for lack of time. But there have been other reports of late that sound like this problem, mostly in high VM/RAM situations. That's two serious bugs that exist in 3.3-release but not in 2.2.8-release. Looking back through the archives, I can see that I'm not the only one who has experienced them. I came away from the experience with the feeling that the FreeBSD project has some serious Q/A problems... and I can assure you, I'm not alone in this feeling. -Ed To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message