On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 07:42:00PM +0200, Doc wrote: > i have little experience with smp boxes but (if it helps): > > working with standard kernels from kernel.org i had problems on a dual > PIII800 machine with kernels 2.4.8 and 2.4.6. Quite often i had oopses > during kernel compile (gcc 2.95 on a debian woody system): two oopses on > three compile runs. After the oops e2fsck crashed during the initial > check and only with a 2.2 NO SMP kernel i could reboot the box cleanly. That sounds like a problem with Linus kernels. There were quite some SMP races fixed in the -ac kernels (including one in the VFS code), and it is very well possible that Linus didn't pick them up in his kernels. Linus forgot to pick up quite some bugfixes recently, that's why -ac kernels are currently much more stable. Note that the 2.4 kernels shipped with distributions are currently also based on -ac kernels. Red Hat's 2.4.2 kernel is actually more like 2.4.2-ac23. Same for Mandrake and Conectiva. > Same sort of problems with 2.2 SMP. That's strange. This starts to smell like hardware problems. > with 2.4.10 no problems during compile. Makes sense, Linus merged quite some stuff from the -ac tree in the 2.4.10-pre kernels. Though it can also be that the new and completely untested VM in 2.4.10 hides the real bug. Erik -- J.A.K. (Erik) Mouw, Information and Communication Theory Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology and Systems, Delft University of Technology, PO BOX 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Phone: +31-15-2783635 Fax: +31-15-2781843 Email: J.A.K.Mouw@its.tudelft.nl WWW: http://www-ict.its.tudelft.nl/~erik/ - Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ IRC Channel: irc.openprojects.net / #kernelnewbies Web Page: http://www.kernelnewbies.org/
