Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2003 15:37:54 +0200
From: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
To: Stephan von Krawczynski <skraw@ithnet.com>
Cc: linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>, marcelo@conectiva.com.br,
       mason@suse.com, green@namesys.com, akpm@osdl.org,
       alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, tejun@aratech.co.kr, chris@memtest86.com
Subject: Re: 2.4.22-pre lockups (case closed)
Message-ID: <20030905133754.GW1611@dualathlon.random>
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On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:24:00AM +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I would like to give you the last update on the story:
> 
> short: hardware problem
> 
> long:
> The box had two different types of RAM (both registered ECC) in it. Two were 1
> GByte, four were 256 MByte to a total of 3 GByte. I had to find out that the
> box runs flawlessly when using only the GByte modules _or_ only the 256 MByte
> modules, but not the mix. All modules are from same vendor. The problem in
> mixed setup does not show up in UP mode (memtest works!). It does not even show
> up straight away, it takes days, but it is always there.
> In fact - even though having sunk weeks of work - I am pretty happy that it
> turned out not to be a kernel problem.

thanks for demonstrating this.

> For the other setups that showed SMP-specific weirdness TeJun may have found
> interesting explanations. I updated them all to 2.4.22 and have not seen any
> problem yet.
> For me it was really interesting to see that reiserfs setups obviously have a
> completely different memory footprint than ext3, and altogether there seems a
> remarkable difference between later kernels and former. The problem showed up
> very seldom on 2.4.21 and below but within 2 days with 2.4.22.

normally that indicates the kernel is somehow using the resources more
efficiently, it's usually a good sign from a kernel standpoint, I heard
of things like this happening also during major upgrades like from 2.2
to 2.4.

> Thanks to all who lend me their ears on the topic and sorry for wasting the
> time.

you're very welcome.

> PS: Obviously there are seldom cases where SMP support in memtest _could_ make
> a difference ;-)

;)

Andrea

/*
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 * svn://svn.kernel.org/linux-2.4/trunk
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