386/ix freezes and crashes
Francois Pinard
pinard at IRO.UMontreal.CA
Fri Aug 25 16:17:58 AEST 1989
Hello. I would like to share some facts and eventually receive some
feedback about a few freezes and crashes I experienced with 386/ix
Unix 2.0.1. Other people may have had similar adventures. Even then,
abstract these glitches, I would be quite satisfied with this system,
which is on several other aspects well behaved beyond my expectations.
1) The system freezes at various places while surface testing the
disk. In fact, character echo is being done, so the system is not
really dead. The very bad side effect of these is that alternate
sector tables never get written, which further induce the system in
unstable operations and prohibit the development of confidence.
2) The probability of a system crash increase drastically if I start
several processes requiring a lot of memory each, to the extent it
is worrying to launch big tasks without killing others first.
Those are the two main problems. The following are, by comparison, of
subsidiary importance:
3) Getting out of cu may cause, sometimes, loss of a virtual terminal
and of UUCP operations. When cu starts, it establishes two tasks,
ending cu will have one of these tasks to terminate, the other will
hang unkillable, with a small, but non negligible probability. An
fsck will be mandatory at the next reboot. This might be related
to ~%nostop, but I've no evidence.
4) If there is any bad block in the free list of a file system, the
system is not mountable. If there is a bad block in the free list
of the root partition, you've lost a system. It would be nice if
fsck was a least able, after having read a bad block, not to keep
it part of its reconstructed free list.
5) A ttymap reset will hang the virtual terminal if done from a
non-root user. I'm not using nor even testing the reset option
anymore.
--
Franc,ois Pinard pinard at iro.umontreal.ca
(514) 588-4656 ``Vivement GNU!'' ...!uunet!iros1!pinard
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