[2725] in Athena Bugs
Re: problems with the VS2 kernel on movies (a vax parallax)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Raeburn)
Mon Aug 7 21:54:09 1989
Date: Mon, 7 Aug 89 21:52:37 EDT
From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
To: John D. Kubiatowicz <kubitron@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU, probe@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: John D. Kubiatowicz's message of Mon, 07 Aug 89 18:02:34 EDT,
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 89 18:02:34 EDT
From: John D. Kubiatowicz <kubitron@ATHENA.MIT.EDU>
As you know, the 6.3B kernel on movies has been panicking rather regularly
with a "reserved operand" error. Since we haven't seen this behavior
on other VS2 machines, we assumed that the problem was with the new
parallax driver code with was distributed with 6.3B.
I beg to differ. I hadn't been aware that there were such problems.
I've seen one or maybe two comments about crashes (basically, that it
did so), but most of the reports from hal@movies have been regarding
the X software or other problems. Never mind making assumptions about
the cause of them....
(In fact, I just searched for "movies" in the bugs and testers discuss
meetings, from 5/30, and didn't find anything about crashes except
that the machine crashed once when a program was dying or dumping core
or something.)
Do you have a PC address for these panics? The main probable cause I
can think of is a use of an emulated instruction in the kernel, but
I'd like to have a look....
If the Parallax console code is preventing crash dumps from taking
place, I would definitely like that change, though (depending on how
large a change it is) it may be too late to get in, with the move to
staff test so close.
-- Ken
