Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 09:50:33 -0500 From: "Thomas T. Veldhouse" <veldy@veldy.net> To: "Rocco Caputo" <troc@netrus.net>, "Doug Russell" <drussell@saturn-tech.com> Cc: "Jonathan Belson" <jon@witchspace.com>, <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Lockups with -Stable on Athlon Message-ID: <009c01c0d7ce$3c7f1490$3028680a@tgt.com> References: <3AF6EE86.FC021C05@witchspace.com> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0105071636050.99490-100000@beastie.saturn-tech.com> <20010508100152.B934@eyrie.homenet>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Can you post that C-program? Tom Veldhouse veldy@veldy.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Rocco Caputo" <troc@netrus.net> To: "Doug Russell" <drussell@saturn-tech.com> Cc: "Jonathan Belson" <jon@witchspace.com>; <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 9:01 AM Subject: Re: Lockups with -Stable on Athlon > I had a problem with at Athlon-1000 HP machine (Pavilion 8860). It > would run fine until I tried "make buildworld", and then it would > freeze solid. This happened nearly every time, but it might take > hours to hang the machine. Nothing else would kill it, though, and I > tried a lot of things. > > Changing the RAM didn't help, and I tried six different modules (three > 256MB pc133s; three 128MB pc100s) in a variety of combinations. > > I finally was able to reproduce the problem quickly and consistently > with a small C program: > > 1. Allocate a 16MB chunk of memory, and strobe it constantly to keep > it in physical memory. "strobe" is a function that increments every > 256th byte to keep the region active. This strobed 16MB region is > what finally made the testcase freeze the machine. Otherwise it would > happily run for as long as I'd let it. > > 2. Allocate 50 chunks of memory, strobing the 16MB chunk after each > malloc. > > 3. Fill each of the 50 memory chunks to swap them in, strobing the > 16MB segment after each memset. > > 4. Free each of the 50 memory chunks, strobing the 16MB segment after > each free. > > Repeat until the system stops responding. In my case, that's usually > within 60 to 300 seconds. Yes, 1 to 5 minutes, sometimes a little > longer, but a total system freeze every time. > > The Windows executable is at <http://poe.perl.org/misc/hpdie.zip>; in > case someone wants to try it. The file is under 16KB. By default, it > allocates fifty 5MB chunks. All told, it's a little more than twice > my machine's 128MB physical memory. The chunk size can be tweaked > with a single integer argument. `hpdie 10` will allocate 10MB chunks > (about 516MB total). `hpdie 0` will probably crash. :) > > I stupidly deleted the source, and the binary is for Windows, and the > machine is on its way to a repair facility, so about all I can offer > sourcewise is an untested rewrite from memory. > > Good luck. > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?009c01c0d7ce$3c7f1490$3028680a>