Hi to all. I am new on the list, so I hope I'm not re-iterating an old topic.
This is a purely academic question now because I got around the problem
(painfully -i.e. I didn't do an Update installation), however, it bothers me
that it was happening in the first place and that our DEC field officer
could get no concrete answer from Digital as to what was wrong. There were
sighted cases of similar problems in Digital's database of logged calls, but
no solutions offered.
We have a DEC Alpha 3000/400 running OSF/1. It was running fine under OSF/1
version 2.1 rev 260. We were installing a RAID on the system, but the
installation failed with complaints about revision incompatibilities. We
upgraded OSF/1 to version 3.0b using the Update option and did associated
firmware upgrades. The system then proceded to crash consistently after boot
up. The crashes were not associated with any particular action. They
happened in single user mode after a period of use (eg. during a tape
restore operation) or they happened during the boot to level 3. The message
on the screen was as follows:
trap: invalid memory read access from kernel mode
faulting virtual address: 0x0000000124bbc890
pc of faulting instruction: 0xfffffc000037e328
ra contents at time of fault: 0xfffffc00003e3080
sp contents at time of fault: 0xffffffff91207210
panic (cpu 0): kernel memory fault
syncing disks... "
I was told this message is standard and doesn't indicate any problem in
particular. My feeling was that the crash was to do with virtual memory. We
have 96Mb memory on board and I thought perhaps this crash was occuring the
first time a program was swapped out to disk. We were pretty sure we'd
eliminated the failed RAID installation as the cause of our woes, by getting
the pre-installation files back.
It seemed to me that OSF/1 V3.0 had serious problems. However, the number of
Digital's logged calls about the same problem and that fact that the product
was shipped to start with, indicated that the cause was probably system
specific. I think it was something in the system-specific configuration
files, since it did not resurface when I installed OSF/1 from scratch.
I wasted a lot of time on this problem and I am not very impressed. Could I
hear from anyone who has had similar experiences and has some suggestions as
to what might have happened.
Thanks in advance.
Anne E. Henderson
Tropical Remote Sensing Unit
CSIRO division of Exploration and Mining
PMB Aitkenvale PO, Townsville, 4814
e-mail a.henderson_at_dem.csiro.au
ph:(077)538544 fax:(077)538600
Received on Thu Jun 29 1995 - 03:20:48 NZST