Hello,

> >> Enabling the awacs driver inevitably and always leads to a crash under
> >> heavy machine use.
> 
> On the machines I've used, this is true (7300, 7600, 9600, AGP G4, gigabit 
> G4). A friend has seen a similar thing on an S900. The Starmax is 
> questionable, since I couldn't cause it to crash (but it did every now and 
> then), but it hasn't crashed since removing awacs, so I don't consider 
> that certain.
Hmm, since I run NetBSD on my S900/G3 I didn't see a single kernel panic ( 2.99.10 right now, started with 1.6.2 but went to 2.0 as soon as it reached beta status ) and I always had awacs enabled.

> I wonder what might be different.
Indeed.

> What kind of heavy use have you done on this G3? My systems have crashed 
> while pushing tens of megabits and/or cvs updating source trees, or some 
> combination of tons of disk activity and network activity at the same 
> time. Also, systems have run for more than a month before crashing.
the last two days it kept compiling monsters like KDE and friends, bonnie++ with a large dataset worked just fine, moving a few gigs over the network didn't impress it either. But I didn't use mc - it's just sitting there doing nothing since I got the ethernet portion of my E100 card working ( some slightly weird DEC 21140 ). cvs update runs every couple of days.

> The only reason I believe this to be completely awacs related is that my 
> colocated 9600 would crash, seemingly inexplicably, every few weeks or so. 
> Since I've removed awacs, it's been up for 89 days and has served more 
> than 3.5 terabytes.
I'll stress the network a bit more to see if something bad happens but somehow I doubt it. I usually compile kernels and so on via NFS ( so I could keep a bunch of editors open on another box ) - no problems at all.

> I can say similar things about my AGP G4 system, too, although I did have 
> some 2.0 related problems, so the 9600 is really the clearest example of 
> awacs problems.
Weird, the only problems I have with 2.0 which aren't related to my hackery are some weird headers in /usr/include/sys which don't compile for some reason ( but aren't really needed either ).

have fun
Michael