Re: 2.2.9 Instabilities

["Dr . David Alan Gilbert" <dg px uk com>]

At 10:34 02/06/99 -0600, you wrote:
>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.

All I can presume is that there is a rogue pointer somewhere which
occasionally
goes a miss and lands in some useful data.

>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/.

I'll have a look.

>> 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. :-)


I have an Adaptec card, but also I have an NCR53c815 card hanging around -
when the machine
started behaving wierdly I thought it would be a good idea to swap the SCSI
cards and
see if it was SCSI/driver related.  Interestingly the first time I booted
it worked
fine, the second time and subsequently however AlphaBIOS hung while
initialising
the NCR card.

Dave