Repeatable 2.3.x SMP hangs; not IDE related

BJerrick@easystreet.com
Sat, 16 Oct 1999 14:45:20 -0700


I've been getting hard hangs with 2.3.{5,15,18,19,20,22} SMP kernels.
("Hard" == screen freezes, no response to keyboard, mouse, ctl-alt-del,
or magic sysrq, no more cron logs.)

I do have an IDE disk, but activity on it isn't an issue (contains
Windoze for a game (sorry)). My real disk is a Seagate ST34572W on an
Adaptec AHA-2940UW (PCI).

The hanging happens repeatably, usually within 20 minutes of starting X,
and often immediately after starting X (on console). If I don't start X,
there doesn't seem to be a problem. Naturally, I haven't done a heck
of lot that way, but I did do some kernel builds with MAKEFLAGS -j3
to get some concurrency, and didn't hang in several hours running.

This has been worse under 2.3.{18,19}; I also got 2 hangs in a couple
of weeks running 2.3.15 . 2.3.{20,22} are better; 2.3.20 lasted 1:15 hr:min,
2.3.22 about the same. I tried eliminating a lot from 2.3.18, but it boiled
down to SMP being the killer.

I have a 2.3.5 SMP kernel built with egcs-1.1.2-14 (Red Hat), and it
seems fine (ran it for many weeks). 2.3.5 built with egcs-1.1.2-18 has hung.
I thought this was a smoking gun, but regressing to egcs-1.1.2-14 did
*not* fix 2.3.18 . Lately I've been using egcs-1.1.2-24 .

Other hardware info:

Tyan S1682-D motherboard
Dual Pentium II, 266 MHz, S-spec SL28L (core stepping C0)
64 megs parity RAM
Adaptec AHA-2940UW (is this a common element with other people's hanging?)
Seagate ST34572W

SCSI drivers are built-in, not modular.

I have good records of kernel version, .config's, and compiler,
so if there are questions, let me know.

If you reply to l-k, please Cc directly to me also
(bjerrick@easystreet.com), since I see only the l-k digest in
http://kt.linuxcare.com/.

Bruce Jerrick
Portland, Oregon, USA
email: bjerrick@easystreet.com

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