On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 08:03:10PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> For what values of "we"?  I've been running 1.4T for years, and have
> been experiencing random crashes of various long-running programs that
> I've written off to bugs in them - notably the X server - but which I
> believe were due to this problem.  Finally one day I tried to run a mud
> on such hardware under 1.4T, and I never once got it to survive long
> enough to start accepting connections.  I switched to a newer machine
> and the problem vanished.
> 
> I have also had the bug strike other code.  I have a picture-display
> program which uses the 3/3/2 TrueColor visual presented by the X server
> on 8bpp PseudoColor hardware, dithering pictures for decent display.
> Once, when running it on such hardware, I had a small number of pixels
> totally garbaged as the dithering program was dithering while the OS
> was paging - it looked like about one cache line of total garbage (or
> for all I know possibly some other process's data).

Sure, I've never used such software. My main test was compilation:
works with current 1.5X just before UBC integration, fail after (same
userland, just swapped kernel).

> 
> I've also yet to have a "make build" complete without dying at least
> once in the process on such hardware.

This was never a problem for me on IPC or SS1+

> 
> And this is all under 1.4T, a pre-UBC kernel.  The bug definitely is
> there pre-UBC.  I even posted to port-sparc about it at the time; I'm
> not sure how this turned into "we've never been able to make it show up
> before UBC integration" - perhaps my reports didn't connect with the
> bug in someone's mind at the time.

Probably. The "we" is me and Chuck Silver. I spend some time on the
problem, and narrowed it down to 2 close dates (2 days) in CVS for the kernel,
one for which a large compile completes, and one for which it fails.
Then I gave Chuck access to my machines, and he spent some time on it too.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
     NetBSD: 24 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--