Re: Lombard hard freeze (update: mem>64MB)

I'm using yaboot too. Does your kernel intialize the
video correctly when you first boot the machine up
from a cold state (as in, it was shutdown, not a
reboot)? I have to go into OF from a cold state, and
boot my macos partition just to the point where the
ROM initializes the video with a grey screen,
otherwise, I get this odd lockup when I boot into
Linux. As the kernel messages scroll down the screen
its fine until it has to scroll the screen up, it just
locks up when it does that. What kernel, yaboot, and
LinuxPPC (or other distro) version are you using?

--- Seanano <sto9013@ksu.edu> wrote:

quoted

  I've been running a lombard with 192 megs of RAM
since it was purchased
without any problem.  I've been running kernels
2.2.14 - 2.2.15-pre20
with almost all of the 2.2.15-preXX kernels coming
from the rysnc server
at linuxcare.com.au.  Up until I installed the 9.0.4
upgrade a few weeks
ago I was using bootX, now I've switched over to
yaboot.  I usually
compile multiple programs at a time and I've never
seen any kernel errors
or freezes.  When the kernel boots it shows Total
Memory = 192MB.


[seanano@ip35 seanano]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
cpu             : 750
temperature     : 0 C
clock           : 399MHz
revision        : 130.2
bogomips        : 801.18
zero pages      : total 0 (0Kb) current: 0 (0Kb)
hits: 0/261 (0%)
machine         : PowerBook1,1
motherboard     : PowerBook1,1 MacRISC Power
Macintosh
L2 cache        : 1024K unified
memory          : 192MB
pmac-generation : NewWorld


[seanano@ip35 /proc]$ cat /proc/meminfo
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:
cached:
Mem:  195981312 50966528 145014784 25296896  3297280
22179840
Swap: 268427264        0 268427264
MemTotal:    191388 kB
MemFree:     141616 kB
MemShared:    24704 kB
Buffers:       3220 kB
Cached:       21660 kB
SwapTotal:   262136 kB
SwapFree:    262136 kB


  I'd be happy to run some tests if needed.  My
network access on the
lombard is a bit unstable right now so I couldn't
download the gnomehack
source...  I should be back to normal in a few days.
 I don't even have
gnome installed anyway...


Sean


On Thu, 11 May 2000, Bernhard Reiter wrote:

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On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 11:07:39AM +0200, Michael

Schmitz wrote:

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i've done some reasonably big compiles and

run seti@home at the same time.

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however i've never kept at it for excessive

periods of time...i'll leave a

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kernel make looping tonight building off an

nfs disk to the local disk

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and see if anything turns up by morning...

I have left my lombard running for 4 days in a

row which included several

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sleeps. During this period I did a 6 hour

stint playing with the development

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kernel code and did about 20 makes. No

problems and this was after

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I bumped it
up to 192. I could try building GRASS just to

empirical though.

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Seems there's more people successfully running

64M in their Lombard here

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than it first seemed. Someone pointed to the

kernel problem corner, so

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what kernel versions were these success stories

run on?

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Yes, we have to gather more data. Than then we

have to seperate

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the problems and search for similiarties and

differences in the

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machines.

There seems to be a significant number of people

having this hard freeze

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problem with Lombards. Here is my preliminary

list, if I counted

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correctly:

	Hard Freezes occuring:

Tim Wojtulewicz		Pismo 	128 MB
Bernhard Reiter		Lombard 128,192   2.2.14,

2.2.15pre19

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Gabriel Ricard	    	Lombard 192 MB   + other

problems

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Mario Scarpa	        hard freeze as described?  64

MB + other problems

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	Running fine:

jeramy b smith		lombard	192 MB
chris mccraw		lombard 128 MB 		2.2.12 thru

2.2.15pre20

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As I have no idea on how to compare the stress

tests, I can only say

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that in 95% of all my test cases I can trigger a

hard freeze within three

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runs of:
	rpm -ba gnomehack.spec
(You can get my src.rpm from:

ftp://intevation.de/users/bernhard/)

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There was one day, when I could run it five times

but still a hard

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freeze later.


So we should gather more data on how to recreate

the bug and then

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ask more people to try to trigger it. As you can

see from my preliminary

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tests, there is no obvious pattern. Maybe we

should also check the

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different lombard models, if there are any. (At

least I have a german

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keyboard, e.g.)


Oh and more details from my part:
My RAM test from MacOS was completed fine,

reporting no errors.

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Adding the mem=64M option to the bootup (I am

using bootx, could that

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make a difference too?) seems to make the system

more stable so far.

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Jeramy, Chris: can you tell us which kernel and

bootprocess you are using?

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	Are you sure that linux uses all the memory?
	Can you build gnomehack three times?


	Bernhard
--
Professional Service around Free Software

      (intevation.net)

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The FreeGIS Project				            (freegis.org)
Association for a Free Informational

Infrastructure            (ffii.org)

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=====
Gabriel Ricard
g_ricard@yahoo.com