Re: RE : [coLinux-devel] SMP system freeze completely

[Clemmitt M. S. <sig...@bl...>]

Hi,

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Florent CUETO wrote:
> I have applied the imagecfg patch on the executables, now colinux works
> perfectly on my P4 3.0C HT.
> Like Alejandro, I've patched all .exe (I did not try to apply the patch
> on colinux-deamon only).

Quick summary: I don't see stability problems with coLinux once
it's running, but I do see cL hangs on startup or shutdown which
cause the Windows host OS to stop working then hang.  I experimented
with configuring some of the executables for uniprocessor
operation via imagecfg -u and got some interesting results.  Some
combinations boot/shutdown without hanging, others hang with
regularity.

Long version: I finally had time to experiment with coLinux-0.6.0 on my 
ancient SMP server box at home.  It's an Intel N440BX machine with dual 
PIII 600 CPUs and 768MB of RAM.  My host OS is WinXP Pro with SP1a and 
all the latest critical and driver updates installed.  I did this using
the Red Hat 9 image with wget, openssh-clients, and samba-clients 
installed, and using 64MB of RAM and a 256MB swap device.  The network
was configured for "tap" access with Internet Connection Sharing
under Windows.

I stress-tested coLinux by running two network and one number-crunching
tests.  The network tests were down/uploading linux-2.6.5.tar.bz2 and
patch-2.6.5.bz2 on my outside DSL connection using wget and scp, and
put/getting the same files to/from the host OS using smbclient.  The
number-crunching program was a small threaded program to calculate
the digits of pi to arbitrary precision.  I ran the network and
number-crunching tests for approx. 2 1/2 hrs. each to see if I
could find any instability.  Under all cases (*.exe being configured
for either UP or MP) coLinux running the Red Hat image didn't
crash or hang.  I didn't try running two tests simultaneously so
maybe I'm not stressing it hard enough.

However, I still see boot/shutdown hangs when running the
original executables on the SMP box.  So I set up some of the
executables to be uniprocessor via imagecfg -u.  Here are
my results (I didn't test colinux-console-nt or 
colinux-bridged-net-daemon):

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Test case   |   c-d   |   c-n-d   |   c-c-f   |   Result
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    A       |    U    |     U     |     U     | No hangs seen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    B       |         |     U     |     U     | Hangs within a few boots
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    C       |    U    |           |     U     | No hangs seen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    D       |    U    |     U     |           | Ho hangs seen
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
    E       |    U    |           |           | Hangs within a few boots
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Key:
     " " == Run as original multiprocessor executable
     "U" == Run as uniprocessor executable after `imagecfg -u'
     "c-d" == colinux-daemon.exe
     "c-n-d" == colinux-net-daemon.exe
     "c-c-f" == colinux-console-fltk.exe
     "No hangs seen" == Booted/shutdown 6 times consecutively without
                        a hang seen
     "Hangs within a few boots" == Hangs within 1-3 consecutive
                                   boots/shutdowns

Once case B boots, it seems to run fine.  I couldn't induce any crashes 
or hangs while running my network or computational stress-testing,
but maybe I'm not testing rigorously enough?

Case E is interesting.  Running either c-n-d or c-c-f as an MP
.exe seems to boot OK, but running them *both* as MP .exe's caused
boots/shutdowns to hang after a few tries.

Again, this is just my own config and testing at home, YMMV :^)

					Clemmitt