Hard Lock-Up Problems
About a month and a half ago I installed Debian Potato on my Cyrix
686-150(200) system with 32Mb of each of RAM and swap. My experience
has been fairly positive, but I am having an extremely annoying problem
with hard lockups.
I quickly determined that these lockups seemed to be reproducible.
Certain files tend to cause lockups when used. I've found a variety of
files that do this - a gimp image I did (gzipping or copying), running
mozilla m4 uncompressed, decompressing kernel source 2.2.5, etc.
This wouldn't be so bad, except that the reboot fsck also seems to choke
on this section of disk. It actually seems to be an off and on problem
- more on than off - it takes me about 1-20 (random) reboots until the
fsck will actually complete without a hard lockup. This little exercise
can take around two hours out of my time. Luckily it doesn't seem to be
doing too much damage.
I'm suspecting something doesn't either like a specific disk position or
consecutive positions, or a specific stream of bytes. I'm looking at
either hardware, kernel or cmos settings.
I'm running a dual boot system and my hardware has previously worked
well on Win95, although i believe the motherboard had drivers. My
mboard chipset is "VXPro-II PCI" and I'm using IDE.
I've tried the 2.0.36 and 2.2.5 package images and compiling my own
2.2.1 and 2.0.36. I've been pointed to IDE bug workaround kernel
compile options, but have tried them turned on.
I've checked out the cmos and fiddled with any options that look like
they might be a problem.
I've tried reading various documentation suggested on the Debian pages
(user faq, hardware compatibility), looking for bug reports, etc. So
apologies if I've missed something somewhere.
All this has come to no avail, so I can only ask the wider populace - do
you know what the deal is here? Where is or how could I work out the
problem? What can I do about it?
Any help would be appreciated.
A 'dmesg' output from a successful boot is included from my 2.2.5
kernel.
Linux version 2.2.5 (root@gondor) (gcc version egcs-2.91.63 19990224
(egcs-1.1.2 pre-release-3)) #2 Fri Apr 16 18:58:40 EST 1999
Console: colour VGA+ 80x50
Calibrating delay loop... 149.50 BogoMIPS
Memory: 29920k/32768k available (1600k kernel code, 412k reserved, 712k
data, 124k init)
Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode...
Ok.
VFS: Diskquotas version dquot_6.4.0 initialized
CPU: Cyrix 6x86L 2x Core/Bus Clock stepping 02
Checking 386/387 coupling... OK, FPU using exception 16 error reporting.
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
Checking for popad bug... OK.
POSIX conformance testing by UNIFIX
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.10 entry at 0xfdb31
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
Linux NET4.0 for Linux 2.2
Based upon Swansea University Computer Society NET3.039
NET4: Linux TCP/IP 1.0 for NET4.0
IP Protocols: ICMP, UDP, TCP, IGMP
Starting kswapd v 1.5
Real Time Clock Driver v1.09
tpqic02: Runtime config, $Revision: 1.10 $, $Date: 1997/01/26 07:13:20 $
tpqic02: DMA buffers: 20 blocks
RAM disk driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size
loop: registered device at major 7
PCI_IDE: unknown IDE controller on PCI bus 00 device 2a, VID=3388,
DID=8013
PCI_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
hda: Maxtor 72004 AP, ATA DISK drive
hdb: ATAPI CD-ROM DRIVE 24X MAXIMUM, ATAPI CDROM drive
hdc: Traxdata CDRW2260+, ATAPI CDROM drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: Maxtor 72004 AP, 1916MB w/128kB Cache, CHS=973/64/63
hdb: ATAPI 20X CD-ROM drive, 120kB Cache
Uniform CDROM driver Revision: 2.54
hdc: ATAPI 6X CD-ROM DVD-RAM CD-R/RW drive, 768kB Cache
Floppy drive(s): fd0 is 1.44M
FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077
md driver 0.36.6 MAX_MD_DEV=4, MAX_REAL=8
scsi: <fdomain> Detection failed (no card)
NCR53c406a: no available ports found
sym53c416.c: Version 1.0.0
Failed initialization of WD-7000 SCSI card!
EATA0: address 0x1f0 in use, skipping probe.
EATA0: address 0x170 in use, skipping probe.
DC390: 0 adapters found
aec671x_detect:
scsi : 0 hosts.
scsi : detected total.
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 > hda3 hda4
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing unused kernel memory: 124k freed
NET4: Unix domain sockets 1.0 for Linux NET4.0.
Adding Swap: 32252k swap-space (priority -1)
Serial driver version 4.27 with no serial options enabled
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS01 at 0x02f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
ttyS03 at 0x02e8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
CSLIP: code copyright 1989 Regents of the University of California
PPP: version 2.3.3 (demand dialling)
PPP line discipline registered.
registered device ppp0
PPP BSD Compression module registered
PPP Deflate Compression module registered
--
Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy
mailto:matty@box.net.au (ICQ #8125618)
Check out the Ultra programming language project!
http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/
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