Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 19:49:24 +0200 (EET) From: Heikki Suonsivu <hsu@clinet.fi> To: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Subject: Could lpt driver cause deadlocks and crashes? Message-ID: <199603131749.TAA11055@cantina.clinet.fi>
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We have been having really bad time with FreeBSD 2.* series since we went
into it. Most of the trouble we have sorted out already, but one machine
(busy news server) kept deadlocking and crashing, several times a day at
worst. Typical problem was a deadlock, either filesystem deadlock or
complete deadlock. Sometimes we got "tsleep" panics, sometimes other
panics. More often it fails to cleanly panic and requires manual reboot.
The machine was also running our HP550C (ascii and PS with ghostscript)
connected to its parallel port. I have been moving services out of the
machine one by one, and what finally seems to have hit was moving the
printer out of it. There has been no crash for last 48 hours, and, more
importantly, the machine we moved the printer into deadlocked within 4
hours, and crashed thrice within next 24 hours. Previously it had been
relatively stable, crashing at most once a week. The reason why I replaced
printer now and not within a month was that we replaced NCR SCSI
controllers with Adapteks to see if that would help, and printing stopped
working altogether. Replacing SCSI controllers did not have any other
effect.
The old machine is ASUS SIS Pentium, new machine ASUS Triton Pentium. The
printer port have been configured into "normal" mode.
There was absolutely no sign that it would be the printer which is the
source of problem. It didn't crash when printer was used, nor it did have
any connection to the amount of printer use. The only hint is that moving
the printer also moved the crashes.
I haven't seen crashes with the machine our second parallel printer is
connected, but that's a VLS (Very Low Speed) matrix printer we use for
labels.
After I go to bed the old machine will probably crash and ruin my fancy
theory :-)
--
Heikki Suonsivu, T{ysikuu 10 C 83/02210 Espoo/FINLAND, hsu@clinet.fi
mobile +358-40-5519679 work +358-0-4375360 fax -4555276 home -8031121
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