On Sun, Apr 23, 2000 at 10:09:34AM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> High load briefly every five minutes?  Hm.  My X sessions would have
> three processes running once a second (as the clock ticks).  So
> naïvely, your machine should last about 300 times as long (five minutes
> divided by one second is 300).  And MTBF for my X session would be
> somewhere around a week.
> 
> And a "make build" would keep the machine busy constantly, and it would
> normally croak in less than a day.

Hum, ok, so not a good data point :)

> 
> I don't know.  I don't know whether IPCs exhibit this failure mode or
> not; I've never had an opportunity to try it.  (For that matter, I
> suspect the cache hardware more than the CPU proper, and I don't think
> all the cache is on the CPU chip.  Hmmm, come to think of it, a few
> cache lines is about the right size for the corruption I saw in that
> picture.  I have a 1+ up, but idling, and dmesg says 16 bytes/line.  My
> IPX shows 32 bytes/line, so they definitely have different cache
> hardware - but it's not quite that simple; an ELC also shows 32.)
> 
> But this mrtg machine, it's not an IPC, is it?  I think the IPCs has a
> framebuffer on the main board.  Or were you considering replacing it
> with an IPC?

No, it's a sparc 2. But I've got an IPC at home with X configured, and I've
never seen this problem. I has never got an uptime of more than a few hours - 
too much noise, I can't sleep when it's running :)

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--