Re: Problems with awk/nbawk on m68k

[Frank Wille <frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost>]

Michael L. Hitch wrote:

> I've seen problems when running nbawk on my amiga while doing release 
> builds (to execersize the system).  I'm pretty sure I've seen the same
> problems some time back, and it just killed by build twice recently.

Few people will build a release on a 68k Amiga, so it's good that you tested
that.


> It's not obvious that this was due to nbawk, but that was my suspicion
> at the time, and I have verfied that it was nbawk.

How did you do that? Did you replace it with a different awk?
It could also be a bug in the kernel or some driver which shows up in nbawk
due to heavy disk access?


> [...] I can now replicate both the above
> nbawk problems with a simple command line.
>
> for N in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
> do
>    MKX11=yes AWK=awk sh distrib/sets/makeflist -b -a m68k -m amiga|
>    sort -u > /tmp/flist.$N echo -n `md5 /tmp/flist.$N`
>    wc -l /tmp/flist.$N
> done

That didn't work for me on my build machine until I also defined MKDTRACE=no
and MKZFS=no.

Do you need a full release build to verify that? Or is it sufficient to
check out src and then run the script? I will do a checkout on my Amiga
now.


> If I do something like a du -s /home/* while running that script, it
> will almost always fail.

So parallel disk activity makes it fail?

Did you also try to run something without disk access in parallel? For
example a benchmark?

Or do you have the possibility to try a different disk driver (e.g. ahsc(4)
compared to cbiisc(4) or wesc(4))? Or try it with tmpfs.


> I'm not quite sure how to debug this, but at least I now can reliably 
> reproduce the failure.  I think I may still have a 4.? version
> installed on that amiga, so I will be trying that to see if the same
> thing happens there as well.

Yes, that would be worth a test.

When it just happens with disk accesses you might also consider to disable
DMA for another test (I have a bad feeling about DMA, since my problems
with amigappc).

Are there other M68k ports where it can be reproduced?

-- 
Frank Wille