Sorry if I sound like a whiner ;-)

Anyway, the other night, I booted an i386 mp kernel with as the
only change the instruction reorder 'barrier' in spl/splx.
I tried some 30 times to reproduce my corruption-when-starting-X
problem, but wasn't successful.

I ran the kernel for about a day, and all was well. Until I decided
to activate the 2nd serial port in my BIOS, rebooted and.. bang.
Now, the 2nd serial port can't have anything to do with this,
it's not actively used, and doesn't share an IRQ with anything.

In desperation, I reflashed my BIOS to a newer version. And now
I can reproduce the problem every single time I start X again.

I'm not ruling out a hardware problem at this point, but it's
very hard to tell. The same data structure being corrupted
each time would suggest it's a software problem, though.

Anyway, just wanted to mention that the problem is still here,
the search continues. Not that the spl/splx fix isn't a good
one, btw, it fixes known instruction reordering problems.

- Frank

-- 
Frank van der Linden                           fvdl@wasabisystems.com
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