Dear alpha managers,
recently we installed Digital Unix 4.0B including the whole set of available
patches on all our alpha-systems ranging from 3000/300 to 500/400 (all single
processor systems) with absolutely no problems.
However, the very same installation on our 4-processor 2100 4/200 turned out
to be completely unusable. Therefore, we decided to do a clean installation
directly on the system itself without any patches applied and only very
little local adaptation --- same result.
And that's what happens: The system boots up without any complaint.
However, NFS-mounts (established by 'amd 5.2.2.2' as NFS3 for systems running
DU4.0B and NFS2 for other servers such as systems running Solaris) that are
performed without problems by ALL OTHER of our alpha systems either sometimes
fail completely (NFS2 server ?? not responding ...) or hang randomly during
normal operation.
This is especially strange for our installation of X11R6 that comes via NFS
from different servers (binaries and sharable things separately).
E.g. a 'xterm' started via NFS ends up in the uniteruptable IO-state 'U' like
1516 ttyp2 U 0:00.37 xterm
Sometimes such windows show up on the screen around half an hour later(!!!)!
The local version /usr/bin/X11/xterm seems to have no problems.
The other strange thing is that programs seem to run 2 to 3 times slower
on the machine running DU 4.0B than on our old configuration using DU 3.2
(we switched back and forth several times to confirm this fact!).
We made various comparisons between the old 3.2 and the new 4.0B installation
and did not find anything significantly different that might cause such
a strange beheaviour. We also browsed through the new release notes of
the current firmware update versions without finding hints on possible
anomalies observed on multiprocessor systems.
Did anybody encounter similar effects on a 2100 4/200 or can somebody
confirm that 4.0B normally should run on such machines without problems?
We would very much appreciate any help in resolving this strange beheaviour.
Regards,
Gernot
--
Dr. Gernot A. Fink Phone: (+49 521) 106-2933; -2935
Universitaet Bielefeld Fax: (+49 521) 106-2992
Technische Fakultaet EMail: gernot_at_techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
Angewandte Informatik SnailMail: Postfach 100131, 33501 BIELEFELD
Received on Thu Oct 23 1997 - 12:19:53 NZDT