My question was where I could find patch kit 1 for DU4.0f, since the compaq
ftp site only has the latest, which is patch kit 2.
Thanks To:
T. S. Horsnell (Terry)
Andrew Moar
for offering their sites for download. I tried Andrew's "down under" site
but couldn't reach it - I ended up successfully pulling the patch from
Terry's site, who temporarily put the patch kit out for me.
FYI - Some of you with very good memories may recall a problem I'd posted
with DU4.0f many months ago that was causing our database product to
intermittently go belly-up under heavy multi-threaded load. The original
diagnosis was that it was perhaps a reentrant sleep() problem. It took us
over a month to come up with a reproducer program that we could send to
Compaq to demonstrate the problem. It took Compaq many weeks to finally
find the problem. Here's their summary:
"It was a word-tear problem in the kernel between two
32 bit (long) data fields of a structure that were being stored "stq'd"
as a 64 bit (quadword). When two kernel threads accessed the fields
independently one of them would end up storing stale data in one of the
long fields overwriting what the other had just written.
Our proposed solution for this customer would be to deliver
a new test std_kern.mod that has the module kern/syscall_subr.c
compiled with "-Wf,-switch,long_granularity"
This fix will require a kernel build and a reboot."
Compaq has sent me the new module to test. Hopefully it'll do the trick,
but they built the module against DU4.0f patch kit 1; hence my request.
(BTW, in no way am I faulting Compaq for taking so long to find the
problem. They've actually been great. We know from painful experience that
these bugs are brutally tough to find. I've no idea how or if it could be
done, but if some of the development tools were better geared to finding
these kinds of things ....??)
Chris
Received on Mon Dec 06 1999 - 18:16:55 NZDT