Tauno Voipio wrote:
> The 2.4.27 kernel prepared two unpleasant surprises when
> upgrading my faithful Sun SS20 (two Hypersparcs) from 2.2.21:
>
> 1. The first attempt with everything needed in the kernel,
> no modules, stopped at boot with SILO complaining of
> a too big uncompressed image (gunzipped it: 2.8 Mbytes).
>
> Is there a hard limit on the Sparc / SILO image size?
> AFAIK, there was still well over 220 Mbytes of free RAM
> at boot time.
>
> 2. The SMP kernel hangs occasionally. It seems that the hang
> is associated with heavy disk write activity, like at the
> end of a mke2fs when everything is being written to disk.
> The process hangs so that it cannot be killed, even with
> a kill -15. The rest of the system stays available, so
> it is possible to log on from another terminal and bring
> the thing cleanly down. Spinlock or uniterruptible sleep?
> A known issue with 2.4.27-SMP?
>
> Uniprocessor compile of the very same kernel works (but
> slower, of course, sigh!).
>
>
> Any light / pointers?
>

1. There is a size limitation with SILO. It is itself linked
to 0x280000 (2.5 Mbytes), which puts a roof on the
code loaded (oh, why!).

2. There is a bug in SMP kernel. It is patched in the
Debian release of 2.4.27 sources. The work as should:
12 hours of crashme did not succeed to crash it.

Tauno Voipio
tauno voipio (at) iki fi