kim@uunet.uu.net (Kim Kempf) (01/07/89)
System - 3/180 server 12mb
XY with 2-MB2333 disks
RF with 2-MB2372 disks
SC with st QIC drive
mti with 16 serial ports
After a couple of weeks of grief and detective work, I've discovered a
problem with the Sun patch tape installation procedure that may be the
source of various flakey problems. After installing the 4.0.1 patch tape
to fix the SCSI and serial driver problems the system would crash quite
regularly with "panic: bus error" problems whenever the SCSI tape was in
operation (sc/st devices). The problem was even more pronounced when the
serial print spooler was running (a serial laser printer on mti port 15).
After a two weeks of frustration with the lack of response from the Sun
Software Support center (aka. /dev/null) and a few postings to sun-spots,
the problem was isolated to the "mtiline" array being 100 bytes too small
and overwriting the "scinfo" array which must store some vital info
required for IRQ service.
This problem was caused by a problem with the patch installation scripts
that simply "tar xp" the files to the targets. My system had the
following mdates on various files:
4.0 Original installation: Apr 7 1988
4.0.1 patch tape Aug 9 1988
general tty patch tape Nov 2 1988
sun3/MCRWARE first build date Nov 21 1988
The news .o and .h files for 4.0.1 had older dates than Nov 21 and the
config/make did not remake mti_conf.o properly. The problem got even
worse after installing the "general tty patch" tape which made a large
change to the ttyline[] arrays, not to mention that the appriopriate .h
files were not even included!
When installing these patches, or if you already have and are having
unexplained problems, you should "rm *.o" in your sun?/SYSTEM directory to
*ensure* that all .o files get rebuilt. Since doing this, I have seen no
more "panics" related to SCSI/serial access. I suspect that the
manifestation of this problem is likely to be different at other sites
depending on the drivers and organization of the particular kernel. I
hope this information helps others out of flakey problems. At least it's
something to try :-)
It would be nice if Sun would make these patch tape installs a little more
bullet proof by using tar -m or something. I know this stuff doesn't go
thru the normal Q.A. like the official releases do :-) but it's quite
frustrating for the patches not to work when the purpose of installing the
patch is because something else is busted.
Special thanks to Mark Plotnick @ Bell Labs as the "second head" on this
problem.
Kim Kempf, Microware Systems Corporation {sun,uunet}!mcrware!kim