Apollo Pro266 system freeze followup

Apollo Pro266 system freeze followup

[John Duff]

Hello,

I noticed a thread on this list about a month ago regarding complete system
freezes on machines using the VIA Apollo Pro266 chipset:

http://uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0107.3/0514.html

I too have such a system: 
(Iwill DVD266-R, two 1GHz PIIIs, 512M of Crucial PC2100, 4 IBM 75GXP 30G 
hard drives each hanging off one of the onboard IDE channels, running 
software RAID-5, Plextor CDRW),
and have seen the same thing.  I first noticed the problem when I decided
to do a stress test involving two simultaneous linux kernel compiles, 
continuously doing make clean and then make bzImage.  This will freeze
the system every time after a few hours or so, guaranteed.

Then I tried compiling a 2.4.9 kernel without SMP support, and it has
been running two simultaneous linux kernel compiles continuously for
more than two days straight on my Iwill box.  I dunno if this is very
helpful in figuring out where the bug may lie in the chipset, but I
thought it might be of interest to others with Apollo Pro266 chipset
boxes, that at least they can run reliably (keeping my fingers crossed)
on just one cpu for now.

(I don't subscribe to the list, so please CC me on any follow-ups).

-John
jfduff@mtu.edu

Re: Apollo Pro266 system freeze followup

[Barry K. Nathan]

Right now I'm running Linux 2.4.9-ac4, compiled for SMP, with the
following loop (in bash):

while : ; do make dep ; make clean ; make -j3 modules bzImage ; done

It's been going for about 7 and a half hours without a lockup, so far.
Note that I am not using the on-board IDE -- but I did not need the
on-board IDE for my lockups either.

If 2.4.9-ac4 still produces lockups for people, it might be interesting
to try 2.2.19 or 2.2.20pre9, compiled for SMP, and see if the lockups
still happen then.

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn@pobox.com>