From: fridlund@mermaid.micro.umn.edu (Jim Fridlund) Subject: Re: Crashing machine: >16M mem patch Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1993 01:55:15 GMT
In article kutcha@eos.acm.rpi.edu (Phillip Rzewski) writes:
> Path: news1.cis.umn.edu!umn.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!rpi!batcomputer!eos.acm.rpi.edu!kutcha
> From: kutcha@eos.acm.rpi.edu (Phillip Rzewski)
> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
> Date: 11 Apr 1993 21:43:11 GMT
> Organization: The Voice of Fate
> Lines: 46
> Distribution: world
> NNTP-Posting-Host: eos.acm.rpi.edu
> Summary: Machine freezes or reboots by itself
> Keywords: 16, 32, megs, memory, patch
> I recently upgraded the memory on my machine from 8 megs in 1 meg
> simms to 32 megs in 4 meg simms. Naturally I would like to be able to
> use all of those 32 megs from within linux. Of course that meant
> enabling the >16M patch option in the kernel configuration.
>
> Trouble is, when I enable it, I can't use my machine for long without
> it breaking. I looked through the FAQ and the only reference I found
> to this sort of thing was "you have to patch the kernel to get >16M".
> It said nothing like "it will break on <this type of machine>" or
> anything. I'm not sure if this is rarely tested code, but I may have
> found a bug. My setup is a 386/25dx, 32 megs of memory in 4 meg simms
> (I think it's called "x9" type memory, not sure), and the "mainboard "
> (motherboard?) is a "PD 386", for what that's worth. I looked through
> the whole manual and found no reference to whether the bus was EISA or
> ISA, but since I bought the machine a couple years ago and didn't know
> anything much about buses at the time, they probably gave me an ISA.
I, too, just upgraded from 8 megs to 16 megs and have the same exact
motherboard as yours. The only thing different is that I have a 33
Mhz Intel chip & 128K cache. I'm also experiencing some problems with
my Linux workstation (ver. 0.99pl7). :) If we do have the same
motherboard, it's definitely not EISA.
> Here's some idea of how I crashed the machine. I made myself two boot
> disks, one with the default "only up 16 megs" and the other with the
> ">16 megs" patch enabled. I booted with the >16M one and went into X.
> I had a kermit open and a couple of xterms running bash, one of which
> I had top in. I then ran idraw once to see what top was saying. It
> accepted that one. I ran a second idraw and it accepted that one. So
> now I had two open at once. I was about to go to make a third when he
> machine froze for a couple seconds and then rebooted by itself. I
> crashed it similarly by compiling gnutar and opening xv and emacs and
> a couple other things (for that one it just froze totally and I had to
> reboot myself), but that would be harder to repeat exactly as I did it
> the first time. The amount of free memory on top was still above the
> 16 meg level when I was crashing the machine. It was usually in the
> 17000k range.
I'm have a different problem though. I'm using 'mke2fs' version alpha
0.2b which came with SLS 0.99pl6 package. It worked perfectly before
the memory upgrade. I dropped back down to 8 megs of memory and
reconfigured the kernel for supporting > 16 megs memory. After
creating the kernel, I then powered the machine down and upgraded the
machine to 16 megs. For a couple of days, my machine was working
fine, but now it is slowly eating away my ext2 partition. I keep
getting 'inode already cleared...' Lots of the files have permission
bits set to '?---------'. /usr/bin/less is one of the dead files. I
understand that there is a new ext2fs 0.2c & 0.99pl8? I'm hoping that
I have enough binaries to build a new kernel & re-compile ext2fs...
I also had problems with 'rm'. It seemed to hang the shell (bash)
when I typed 'rm -rf' on a temporary directory. I tried killing the
'rm' process also, but no luck. The only way out is a 'sync;reboot'
on a a different virtual console.
> To then get some comparison, I booted with the other disk so I was
> limited to only the first 16 megs of memory. Right off the bat I
> opened 4 idraws with no problems whatsoever. As I am typing this
> message I am using the same session I once had the idraws on. It is
> quite obvious that the difference between with the patch an without
> the patch is: one works, one doesn't (for me).
> I guess the questions that need to be asked are: has anyone else had
> this happen? has anyone else done these tests and had it work? if so
> what is your config? is it simply a case that no one actually has 32
> megs of memory and hence this code never gets tested? if my problem is
> serious is there one person in particular i should be telling this to?
>
> --
> Phillip Andrew Rzewski Internet: kutcha@acm.rpi.edu
> "Destruction is not negative, you must destroy to build."
> -- Einsturzende Neubauten "Zeichnungen Des Patienten O.T."
>
I also added a Toshiba 3101(?) SCSI CD-ROM. I took this off a PS/2
system that had some IBM proprietary SCSI interface. I just pulled
out that card and now is a standard SCSI CD-ROM. Does anyone have a
drive like this? Does it work with the current port of xcdplayer? I
just want to play my music on it. Linux does recognize that it is a
CD-ROM, however. I've verified that there is no SCSI address conflict
because my system worked with the CD-ROM under 8 megs of ram, but 16
megs gives my hard disk some problem.
Any help/suggestion(s) greatly appreciated. Linus?
BTW, my $0.01 worth: I've shrunk my DOS partition down to 40 megs
(for games). Almost gone! Heck, I haven't played games in a while,
maybe I just get rid of DOS completely... 8)