From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jan 19 00:31:54 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id AAA13180 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 19 Jan 1995 00:31:54 -0800 Received: from campino.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (campino.Informatik.RWTH-Aachen.DE [137.226.225.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with SMTP id AAA13174 for ; Thu, 19 Jan 1995 00:31:45 -0800 Received: from gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de by campino.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (4.1/campino-6) id AA00238; Thu, 19 Jan 95 09:31:23 +0100 Received: by gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de (KAA25561); Thu, 19 Jan 1995 10:36:59 +0100 Message-Id: <199501190936.KAA25561@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> Subject: Re: is it hardware? To: jdc@crab.xinside.com Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 10:36:58 +0100 (MET) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com (user alias) In-Reply-To: <199501190551.WAA13990@crab.xinside.com> from "Jeremy Chatfield" at Jan 18, 95 10:51:51 pm From: Christoph Kukulies Reply-To: Christoph Kukulies X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 3243 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. Looking at ther errors I got in files r -> 2, h -> ( leads me to this side calculation: OK hex 72 emit r 72 2 base ! . 1110010 hex 32 emit 2 32 2 base ! . 110010 hex 28 emit ( 28 2 base ! . 101000 hex 68 2 base ! . 1101000 bye and to the conclusion that bit 6 was flipped in either case. Cache? I'll try to get my cache changed. > > 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 Now I'm aware, too :-) How many mails does Xinside, Inc. receive that way daily? ;-) > 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 :-) Though I'm in a physics lab our power is very stable (despite of some announced outages once or twice per year) - power is very constant in Europe anyway compared to the US due to the Energie Verbundsystem. > > 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 > --Chris Christoph P. U. Kukulies kuku@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de FreeBSD blues 2.1.0-Development FreeBSD 2.1.0-Development #1: Wed Jan 18 10:42:31 1995 kuku@blues:/usr/src/sys/compile/BLUES i386