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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>

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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.
> 



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