Re: 2.2.9 Instabilities

[Michal Jaegermann <michal ellpspace math ualberta ca>]

Dr . David Alan Gilbert wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
>   Last night I compiled 2.2.7 and 2.2.8 - 2.2.7 and 2.2.8 seem
> to be stable on my machine while 2.2.9 is not.

This is somewhat strange.  The main difference between 2.2.9 and 2.2.8
is that 2.2.8 had some unfortunate changes in a buffer code; these 2.2.8
changes can hose your file systems in right circumstances and 2.2.9
backed them off to the previous state (like in 2.2.7).  These are
basically all what happened between 2.2.8 and 2.2.9.

I would strongly advise __against__ using 2.2.8.  If you have to
then go back to 2.2.7 although this one had semaphore troubles
on Alpha.  Richard Henderson has various alpha patches for 2.2.9 on
ftp://ftp.twiddle.net/pub/rth/.

For myself my latest test version of 2.2.9 has an uptime of 9 days
on alpha and nothing bad happened.  I also did 'cat /dev/zero | tail -f'
a few times as I heard complaints that 2.2.9 goes haywire on alpha
when swap usage reaches over 8 Megs.  The command above has an effect of
eating up the whole virtual memory.  I got an expected "Out of memory"
but nothing unsightly otherwise.  Shrug!

> These were all compiled
> under the same compiler set (RH6 standard dist).

This I do not know.  I am using straight egcs 1.1.2 release which I
compiled myself from sources.

> but configured), Adaptec SCSI (also tried with NCR53c7,8xx but Adaptec still
                                                    ^^^^^^^
                                          This has to be a joke!

This is an old driver, basically from times of 1.2 - or earlier - kernels,
when NCR53c810 was the state of the art, and kept around because somebody
may have a very old equipment (in principle NCR53c7xx) which otherwise
will not work.  The driver was not really updated for quite a long while.
Maybe there were some NCR SCSI controllers used, in practice, with alpha
boards which would not work with ncr53c8xx driver.  I have yet to see one
even on quite old machines.  A great majority of these will be happy with
a newer sym53c8xx.  Some of the current NCR based controllers __require__
the last one.

OTOH if you really have an Adaptec controller, as the above seem to
imply, then which of NCR drivers you try with it is pretty irrelevant. :-)

  Michal