Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 14:01:26 -0700 (PDT) From: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org> To: rwatson@FreeBSD.org Cc: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: 5.1-RELEASE TODO Message-ID: <200305132101.h4DL1QM7051267@gw.catspoiler.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1030513160443.72145a-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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On 13 May, Robert Watson wrote: > > On Tue, 13 May 2003, Heiko Schaefer wrote: > >> > That said, we are actively discussing what, if any, workarounds are >> > appropriate, including some alternative workarounds from the ones >> > currently present. >> >> bosko (who was mentioned here various time, regarding a patch to work >> around this) has contacted me, and i am looking forward to try his >> patch. assuming that the patch is correct (whatever that would mean in >> this context), and there is some chance of accepting it anytime soon, >> maybe it would be sensible to try to get that into the release - or >> delay the release until this is sorted out ?! >> >> wouldn't a release that corrupts data in many, relevant, cases (i >> consider the box i had the trouble with entirely mainstream) be worse >> than no release at all? > > You don't need to argue to me that we need stability (I'm a fan of it > myself): what I need is evidence that some set of changes is actually > solving the problem, not masking it. If there exists a patch that > substantially improves stability on some set of systems (and not at the > cost of another set), I think you can rest assured that we'll get it into > the release. As with you, we're very concerned by the recent spate of > instability, especially in the beta cycle, and how to address that is very > much on our minds. Both my AMD system running -current and PII system running -stable are afflicted with these data corruption problems. The limited amount of information that I've seen about these problems leads me to believe that in order to use the 4 MB page feature without danger to system integrity is to relocate the kernel. If this is the case, then it would seem to make sense to disable the use of 4 MB pages by adding the DISABLE_PSE option until the system is patched. PG_G is probably different. A better case can be made that using this option is only masking software bugs that should be fixable. The problem is that these bugs are only rarely triggered, look a lot like flakey hardware, and it's just about impossible for most FreeBSD users to track the problem to its root cause.
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