On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 07:56:58PM +0100, Guenther Grau wrote:

> > I thought I had some bad RAM, but it seems very likely that softdep caused
> > the symptoms I was seeing.
> 
> I still don't buy this completely, yet.

That's fine. I have nothing invested in the idea softdep being buggy... I
just want to see it all work. :) I'll happily be a guinea pig.

> Are you sure that your mainboard can cope with 128MB-DIMMs.

Yeah. When I disabled softdep, it ran fine with the newer 128 meg stick.
I then threw in the original (presumed bad) 128 meg stick and it worked
fine. I think I even swapped positions with no problems. The only difference
between it working and not working was my booting single-user and turning
off softdep everywhere where I had it turned on.

My mainboard is, incidentally, a relatively recent DFI. I'll nail down the
exact model later. The company releases BIOS patches for Linux, so they're
at least a little Unix-friendly.

> Is it possible to put 4 32MB sticks in there (from work? :-)?

That would be tough, but I might be able to arrange it... I have to borrow
it from unused machines, and we're about out of those! Heh.

> If this system is not stable, then we should go bug hunting in the softdep
> code.

Since someone suggested using COMPAT_43 as a workaround to get ifconfig and
dhcp and stuff working, my system is now rock solid once again, so it's time
to shake it up. :) My kernel right now has softdep compiled it - I'm just not
using it anywhere. However, since I have a silly large amount of RAM, I've
just started (yesterday) using an mfs for /tmp, so I've got a partition free
on which I can inflict softdep.

> Sorry, but I forgot: What happens when it's unstable?
> Will the kernel crash? Have you got a backtrace?

I *believe* it was unable to successfully access a device for purposes of
dumping. I'll have a far more detailed report for you this evening, once
I get home.

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss             (( "In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams
mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us  )) build  their nest  with fragments  dropped
http://acheron.ne.mediaone.net ((  from day's caravan." - Rabindranath Tagore