Mailing List Archive

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Ferris McCormick wrote:

> However, U2-SMP(2x450) is not. As is the case with ALL 2.6.xx kernels,
> 2.6.15-r4 cannot handle the sort of disk activity which portage requires

Just as a data point, you do realize that the 450MHz CPU was never
actually supported in the Ultra-2? While it may boot, it wasn't made to
work together nor was it sold as an upgrade. You may be tripping on some
marginal timing issue.

If you have 400MHz/2MB CPUs sitting around it may be worth testing with
them to isolate that as a cause.


--
#!/jameel/akari
sleep 4800;
make clean && make breakfast
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On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 08:28 -0500, Jameel Akari wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Ferris McCormick wrote:
>
> > However, U2-SMP(2x450) is not. As is the case with ALL 2.6.xx kernels,
> > 2.6.15-r4 cannot handle the sort of disk activity which portage requires
>
> Just as a data point, you do realize that the 450MHz CPU was never
> actually supported in the Ultra-2? While it may boot, it wasn't made to
> work together nor was it sold as an upgrade. You may be tripping on some
> marginal timing issue.
>
> If you have 400MHz/2MB CPUs sitting around it may be worth testing with
> them to isolate that as a cause.
>

As is too often the case, I mistyped. The stable system is U60(2x450);
the unstable system is U2(2x400). Thanks for catching this.

>
> --
> #!/jameel/akari
> sleep 4800;
> make clean && make breakfast
Regards,
Ferris (who sometimes expects way too much ESP support from his readers)
--
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Sparc, Devrel)

Ferris McCormick wrote in response to
> On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 08:28 -0500, Jameel Akari wrote:
>> On Wed, 15 Feb 2006, Ferris McCormick wrote:
>>
>>> However, U2-SMP(2x450) is not. As is the case with ALL 2.6.xx
>>> kernels,2.6.15-r4 cannot handle the sort of disk activity which
>>> portage requires
>>
>> If you have 400MHz/2MB CPUs sitting around it may be worth testing
>> with them to isolate that as a cause.
>
> As is too often the case, I mistyped. The stable system is
> U60(2x450); the unstable system is U2(2x400). Thanks for
> catching this.

I can also add that my U2 (2x300) is also having the same lockup
on high disk activity. I've been able to 'nice' my portage related
activity down and avoid it crashing on the last few package emerges,
but it's not a cure-all.


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On Fri, 17 Feb 2006, Leif Sawyer wrote:

> I can also add that my U2 (2x300) is also having the same lockup
> on high disk activity. I've been able to 'nice' my portage related
> activity down and avoid it crashing on the last few package emerges,
> but it's not a cure-all.

If you can easily reproduce this problem, could you try to get some useful
debugging info? If you can drop into prom after machine hangs, what
backtrace does the ctrace command give you? Could you try compiling the
kernel with spinlock debugging ang magic sysrq key support and see if you
can get some information on where it hangs that way?

We are hitting some kind of SMP lockup issues in Debian, however it is
much harder to reproduce. The automatic sparc build machines (running
2.6.8) occasionally hang when trying to build large packages, like
openoffice.org. All attempts to reproduce this failure locally failed so
far. As it might be caused by the same bug you are hitting, we would be
*very* interested in any progress on this, since these hangs currently
are the main obstacle which might prevent the inclusion of sparc port into
the next official Debian release.

Best regards,

Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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