Re: Unstable Ruffian

[furio ercolessi <furio spin it>]

> > 
> > Uninstall egcs and stick on gcc 2.8.x or 2.7.x.  
> > compile - install - reboot - enjoy

I thank Adrian for this suggestion: I will try it.

Michal:

> From my experience this is a very doubtful advice - especially
> if you are talking about gcc 2.8.0 (which is really bad). 
>   [...]
> Problems caused by "register pressure" are not likely to hit
> you on Alpha and this thing is a bug with a long history which is
> equally present at this moment in gcc and egcs.

I am not in the position to comment about this.
However, I noticed that all the "official" kernels for this board - 
and with this term I mean the original Deskstation 2.0.30 at
ftp://www.deskstation.com/linux/ and the one in
ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.1/alpha/kernels/ruffian.gz
(by Jay?) - were compiled with gcc and not with egcs (in spite of the
fact that RH 5.1 is distributed with egcs and not with gcc).
So there is something fishy here, and there might be something
right in Adrian's suggestion, from an empirical point of view.

> p.s. Posting a bunch of registers dumps from **some** kernel is not
> of a very great help.  Nobody but a poster can tie them up, with
> a help of a System.map for this particular kernel, to a specific
> piece of code. 

Yes, I apologize.  I did not expect anyone to diagnose my problem
at this stage, I was just looking for general suggestions and
wanted to give a flavor of the kind of problem I have.
Anyway, I did look into the system map and included the name of
the functions in my post.  I admit to be very ignorant about 
decoding oops messages.  But according to Linus (oops-tracing.txt),
I will be very good at that in the year 2003, and perhaps even
before that if I persist in trying to use this board ;-)

Thanks to everybody in this thread!

furio ercolessi
Spin - Trieste (Italy)