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From: goran@dynas.se (G|ran Hammarb{ck)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Subject: [FreeBSD1.0] Disk-lite hang
Date: 15 Nov 1993 09:40:11 +0100
Organization: Dynasoft, Dynamic Software AB
Lines: 46
Message-ID: <2c7f9b$ht8@gyro.dynas.se>
NNTP-Posting-Host: gyro.dynas.se
Two weeks ago I decided to change from 386bsd pl2.4 to FreeBSD1.0,
mainly to run XFree2.0. Now I'm beginning to wonder if this was
such a great idea after all. My system (described below) which
worked with 386bsd now hangs with the disk-lamp lit at random
times (much too often) when doing disk i/o. The only change I
made to the system when switching to FreeBSD was to use my Maxtor
7213 200 MB disk as the only disk. It used to be my secondary disk.
It seems only processes accessing the disk are hung. The machine
hangs quite often, usually during heavy disk I/O, but it has been
known to hang when emacs does an auto-save and nothing else was
using the disk. This makes the system slightly less than useless.
If someone has a patch for this I would be very grateful.
My system:
33 MHz 486DX, 8MB RAM, 128kB external cache, AMI BIOS
1 Brand X serial/parallel/IDE controller
1 Brand X wd90c31 graphics controller
1 Sounblaster clone sound card
1 Maxtor 7213 2mm MB IDE disk
Things I have tried:
1) Using the alternate kernel (386bsd.altwd) from FreeBSD.cdrom.com - no luck
2) Using a different IDE controller - no
3) Slowing down the ISA bus - no
4) Disabling external cache - no
5) Disabling internal cache - possibly
6) Running system in 6MHz - seems to work
The only things that seems to work are 5 and 6. In case 5, I just tried
a few minutes, but it survived things that hung the machine in the first 4
cases (starting a compile and emacs using X). 6 worked a whole afternoon
(this probably makes the ISA bus slower and disables chaching as well).
The problem is that both 5 and 6 makes the machine painfully slow...
Judging from the above results I would guess there is a timing problem
in the disk-driver code for at least some IDE controllers. Unfortunately
my diskspace is limited, so I don't have the FreeBSD and 386bsd source
online, so I have not been able to compare the codes for the disk-driver.
Any help with this problem is appreciated.
Thanks,
Goran Hammarback
E-mail: goran@dynas.se