henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (10/17/84)
Well, we tested out a new kernel, with a couple of significant performance improvements (hashing in the inode table, and a freelist for the file table), plus other minor trivia. Looked fine single-user. When we came up multi-user, bizarre things started happening. Shut down again, came back up with the old /unix. Same bizarre problems. I noticed we were getting disk errors. Shut down again, started out to figure out just what was going on -- were our precious Eagles failing all of a sudden? -- and suddenly realized that I'd write-protected drive B during the standalone testing, and never un-protected it!! A flip of a switch, and we came back up perfectly. The real puzzle is, why was the system reacting so poorly to this? The proper response to something like this is a spew of console messages; there weren't any until I tinkered with the srm parameters. Even worse, there were indications that user programs weren't seeing errors either. I've seen some signs of error-handling problems in the rm driver before; it's time for a thorough investigation. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry