From owner-freebsd-bugs Wed Mar 13 09:50:27 1996 Return-Path: owner-bugs Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA12701 for bugs-outgoing; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 09:50:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from hauki.clinet.fi (root@hauki.clinet.fi [194.100.0.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA12663 for ; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 09:49:41 -0800 (PST) Received: from cantina.clinet.fi (root@cantina.clinet.fi [194.100.0.15]) by hauki.clinet.fi (8.7.3/8.6.4) with ESMTP id TAA14850 for ; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 19:49:25 +0200 (EET) Received: (hsu@localhost) by cantina.clinet.fi (8.7.3/8.6.4) id TAA11055; Wed, 13 Mar 1996 19:49:24 +0200 (EET) Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 19:49:24 +0200 (EET) Message-Id: <199603131749.TAA11055@cantina.clinet.fi> From: Heikki Suonsivu To: freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org Subject: Could lpt driver cause deadlocks and crashes? Organization: Clinet Ltd, Espoo, Finland Sender: owner-bugs@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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