From: mrex@aix01.rz.fht-mannheim.de (Martin Rex)
Subject: Xlinux.8514: 0.97-1 ok -- 0.97-4 not (long)
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 92 16:14:53 GMT
Organization: Fachhochschule fuer Technik Mannheim
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4

Hi,

I have recently installed Linux 0.97pl1 on my machine
(i486/33/20MB/200MB AT-Bus/ATI Graphics Ultra), and GCC-2.2.2d,
X-1.1 and Kevin Martin's Xlinux.8514.

Under 0.97pl1 everything was working fine, and I have successfully
compiled about 20 X-programs so far.  The only bad thing about
compiling: I HAVE TO use gcc-2.2.2 for the linking, when compiling
X-Software (linking with X-libs), otherwise I get SegVs. :-((
(using shared libraries; statically linked seems to work in
 rare occasions.)

The last weekend I have experienced file system corruption twice
on my main minix partition (50 MB), and spent about 10 hours of
saving and restoring (and verifying as good as possible) the data
on this partition.  Yes, I have used "strip" from the 0.97pl1
rootdisk, so I guess that was one reason from what I understand
from Linus' posting about patch4.

I've been heavily using X on 0.97pl1, and it works really well.

Yesterday I have ftp'ed the 0.97pl4-kernel and comiled it on
my machine (it takes less than 7 minutes from scratch), and
tried X on it.  It starts up and it runs, but I have big
problems on quitting X!  The CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE works, but
when I end my startup-shell (I have "exec xterm -ls" as the
last line of my xinitrc), the X-Server doesn't close down
correctly and hangs.

When I kill all programs that use the X-server ("xclock, twm"),
and then kill the xterm as the last program accessing the server,
then the Server shuts down smooth and returns to the virtual console.
As soon as there is another program using the X-Server when the
xinitrc-process (my startup shell/xterm) is killed/ended,
the keyboard and screen freezes with a partially cleard display.
(the system is still operational through the serial port then.)
When this once happened, I am not able to restore normal behavior
on the "console".  I may kill every X-related process from the serial
session, but the screen stays the same.  When I restart X from the
serial session, the Display is back under control of the X-server,
and even the mouse is working, but the keyboard is not recognized
anymore.  When I kill this renewed session first twm & xclock, then
the startup xterm/shell, the screen returns to text-mode,
but the keyboard still doesn't work.

I have never had any such problem with 0.97pl1, where I could exit
the startup-shell with as many as 8 windows open, and the X-Server
would still shut down smoothly.

But there's something else I've noticed under both pl1 & pl4 which
has been mentioned in this list recently.  Sometimes after X-shutdown
a zombie xinitrc stays around, and accumulates huge amount of
process time.  It usally drains about 30-50% of the power of the
machine.  I usually notice it only when comiling or having xfishtank
in the background, normally the machine is still acceptably responsive.
The zombie xinitrc always has a <defunct> brother, so I think
there is some kind of deadlock of two processes.

During the little time of trying last night, I also had a very strange
behaviour of 0.97pl4.  After killing and rerunning X serveral times
over the serial session trying to get back a usable console,
the machine must have trashed/mangled or filled up its memory and
page space, because it was suddenly very slow with its responses,
and it was accessing the hard disk every several seconds, but there
weren't any process running which could cause this harddisk activity,
I had only started X (startx), but this time it could not even get
the control back over the screen.  The machine was really really slow,
and the strange disk activities went on for over 10 minutes
(until I hit the hard-reset).   I was trying to get the control back,
but my serial session fell asleep on an "ps" command (it listed
only the first three processes very very slowly).  I pulled the
serial connection because there was no further reaction to Crtl-Cs
and Ctrl-Zs.  After reconnection of the serial cable, it took about
one minute before the login prompt reappered, and then the characters
were slowly echoed back.  I even got the login greeting, but I didn't
get to the shell prompt (maybe my login script was to long -- the machine
still was down to the knees with workload -- but I have no idea what
it was doing!  I assume it was mainly swapping (the disk activity ...)
(btw. my swap-partition is 10MB).

I'd rather stay with 0.97pl1, if there's something wrong with pl4 (pl3),
but I would like to get the file system fixes in my pl1 at least!

Any ideas ?

-Martin

--
 Martin Rex                              |  "Have the courage to take
 Rechenzentrum                           |   your own thoughts seriously,
 Fachhochschule fuer Technik Mannheim    |   for they will shape you."
 E-Mail:  mrex@aix01.rz.fht-mannheim.de  |             -- Albert Einstein