thanks to Dough Johnson, Dr.Tom Blinn and Alan Rollow for the solution.
Our systems (the 500au workstations) have power management software
installed. There is a dynamically loadable kernel subsystem called
'pwrmgr', which can be configured with either sysconfigdb or dxpower.
Have a look at the man pages for details.
The system in question had the following defaults configured:
# sysconfig -q pwrmgr
pwrmgr:
default_pwrmgr_state = 1
cpu_slowdown = 1
disk_spindown = 1
disk_dwell_time = 20
graphics_powerdown = 1
graphics_standby_dwell = 20
graphics_suspend_dwell = 20
graphics_off_dwell = 60
I set disk_spindown = 0 with the sysconfigdb command by creating a stanza
file containing
pwrmgr
disk_spindown = 0
and loading it with sysconfigdb -a -f <stanzafile> pwrmgr.
Dr.Tom Blinn pointed out that even when a swap disk is spun down, this
should not really lead to a crash of the system. If this happens it is
either a bug, or there is some other reason why the system hung.
I will continue to look into that.
Thanks to the list
Goetz
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Dr. Goetz Golla Internet: golla_at_genua.de
GeNUA mbH - 85551 Kirchheim Tel: +49 (89) 991950-0
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Here is my original question:
> since I installed the newest firmware revision (5.3) and DU4.0e on our
> 500au's I observed that two of the harddisks (one is a DEC RZ1CB-BS) do an
> automatic spin-down after a certain idle time.
> While this is no problem for ordinary disk access to ufs or advfs
> partitions (there is just a short spin-up delay), it is fatal for disks
> holding a swap partition. As soon as the alphas try to access this
> partition the whole system freezes.
> I heard that for intel based PCs the spin-down can be configured in the
> BIOS. Is there an equivalent for the alphas ? Has someone experienced a
> similar behaviour after the Firmware and OS upgrade ?
Received on Sun Feb 14 1999 - 19:24:42 NZDT