From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 18 21:55:30 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id VAA11762 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 18 Jan 1995 21:55:30 -0800 Received: from crab.xinside.com (crab.xinside.com [199.120.247.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id VAA11756 for ; Wed, 18 Jan 1995 21:55:26 -0800 Received: (jdc@localhost) by crab.xinside.com (8.6.8/8.6.5) id WAA13990; Wed, 18 Jan 1995 22:51:52 -0700 From: Jeremy Chatfield Message-Id: <199501190551.WAA13990@crab.xinside.com> Subject: Re: is it hardware? To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de (Christoph P. Kukulies) Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 22:51:51 +0000 (MST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com In-Reply-To: <199501182114.WAA20475@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> from "Christoph P. Kukulies" at Jan 18, 95 10:14:42 pm Organization: X Inside Inc, P O Box 10774, Golden, CO 80401-0610, USA. Phone: +1(303)470-5302 Reply-To: jdc@crab.xinside.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 2302 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Christoph P. Kukulies writes: ... > I'm running the X server of Xinside, Inc.. Pretty nice server > but while playing with wb (whiteboard) and scrolling a picture > the server died and the system was doing a bus error on every > cc invocation during making a kernel. I rebooted and the > core dumps had disappeared. But I had strange characters > in two included files (../../sys/queue.h had a ((ead) instead > of (head) in a macro and some other file was in error, > st2uct instead of struct. Some of you may be aware that our Server is configured to send email, by default, with a human readable stack trace and the configuration file in use... We have received the email from this event. There is no immediately obvious reason why the Server would fail in the function that died. Our first guess was that the machine might be a 486SX or similar no-FPU system, but that seems to be false. This leaves us with two likely candidates: + Something to do with 'wb' + Hey, it's just one of those strange things, y'know? Of the two, a 'wb' explanation is the preferred, since it is testable. Not, however, by us - until someone mails me the location of the programs. I deleted the email with the locations before I read this mail. > So I wonder when these files got corrupted. During sup? > What might be the cause for such instabilities? Memory? > ISA bus? VL Bus? On the basis of prior experience, we found that the proportion of inexplicable system failures dropped significantly when we switched to using UPS's on all machines. Under the category of "one of those strange things", count very short power supply interruptions. I'm not sure about your power supply company, but in the UK and the US, they don't count interruptions of below a couple of seconds. That is a delay long enough to cause most systems to reboot. If shorter, you may simply get a bad sag. At the other end, could you have received a spike in the voltage - are you near a Physics Lab, for example :-) Cheers, JeremyC. -- Jeremy Chatfield, +1(303)470-5302, FAX:+1(303)470-5513, email:jdc@xinside.com X Inside Inc, P O Box 10774, Golden, CO 80401-0610, USA. Commercial X Server - for more information please try these services http://www.xinside.com info@xinside.com ftp.xinside.com