[ On Friday, January 23, 2004 at 22:17:37 (-0600), Eric Schnoebelen wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: gcc 2.95.2 sanity check, please 
>
> 
> "Greg A. Woods" writes:
> - Expressions as simple as that above also occur in a bazillion other
> - places in the whole code-base -- it's just an integer mask and test.
> 
> 	Yup, I'm aware of that.. Which is why I was so suprised
> to see the truth path being taken when it was obvious it should
> be false..

very strange indeed!

BTW, did you really mean "2.95.2", or was that supposed to be "2.95.3"?

> 	Now, it's entirely possible that I was remembering
> something from the FreeBSD/alpha system...
> 
> 	All the more annoying, since changing the clients from
> using soft nfs mounts to hard (non-interruptable) mounts, nary a
> vnode starvation has been seen.  Running the same kernel.

Hmm....  I've got my sources on NFS, and my NFS server suffers from an
occasional "le0: device timeout" problem when under load (it should be
using pcn(4), but this machine suffers the pcn MII panic-on-boot-
if-link-enabled bug).  With most clients the result is that things seem
to hang for a second or two, then all's well.  However on the alpha the
build sometimes comes to a stop until I trigger some other NFS activity
from anther session.  It did that when I was having supper and it stayed
stuck until I tickled it with an "ls" in my NFS-mounted home dir a
couple of hours later, and it's done it once more since.  On the console
I get the expected "nfs server proven.weird.com:/work: not responding"
error, and "nfs server proven.weird.com:/work: is alive again" when it
starts working again (and sometimes, presumably depending on the file
operation, I see the same messages in the window where the build is
running).

As far as I know this "pause" only happens on the alpha.  On other i386
and sparc clients of the same NFS server the same console messages
appear whenever the le driver suffers a timeout but the client always
recovers automatically.  Of course on the other machines there may be
other tasks "tickling" the NFS mounts often enough that I don't see the
hang last very long.

I wonder if this is all just my imagination, or whether there could be
anything to it that's related to what you're mentioning.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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