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OSR5.0.6 activity freeze Pentium 4

From: Bill Brier <steggy@bcstechnology.net> Date: Fri Apr
25, 2003  1:59:50 PM US/Eastern Subject: OSR 5.0.6 on High End
Hardware

Early last month, I found an obscure TA on the SCO website that
referred to activity stops on OSR 5.0.6 when installed on Pentium
4 systems. What was described is very similar to what I ran into
over a year ago trying to run 5.0.6 on a high end AMD Athlon box.
All activity would halt for no apparent reason, but would resume
if a key was pressed on the console (or the mouse moved). I though
I had worked out a way around this with a specific installation
bootstring, butt it has since proven to be unreliable.

Anyhow, TA 119202 describes a workaround to the activity stop issue
by making a relatively trivial patch to the /etc/conf/pack.d/clock/Driver.o
object file, followed by relinking the kernel. I am in the process
of testing this change on one of my "mules" (an AMD 2200XP box) to
see if it really works. I've got a cron job set up to write out
the date and uptime to a file at 4 hour intervals. Since one of
the activity stop symptoms was erroneous uptimes and another was
cron jobs not running on schedule, this should indicate if the
patch fixes the problem. Will let you know what happens.

The above referenced test of TA 119202 was successful. I ran the
test on an AMD 2200 XP processor, an Abit KG-7 DDR mainboard equipped
with a hybrid AMD/ViaTech chipset, ATI Radeon 7000 video card,
Adaptec 29160 U160 host adapter, 256 megs of PC2100 ECC DDR memory
and dual 3Com 3C905TX-M NIC's. The dual NIC installation allowed
me to check NAT operation. I did not overclock the system nor did
I perform any BIOS tweaks to memory timing, PCI bus latency, etc.
In other words, the board was run as it came out of the box, adjusted
only for the processor's rated core clock and front side bus speed.

This machine was continuously run for exactly 120 hours, with a
cron job updating a log to indicate the kernel's notion of system
uptime, this update scheduled to run at four hour intervals on the
hour. I also blocked all external communication to the machine to
minimize I/O generated interrupt activity. At the end of the test,
the log indicated that the cron updates occurred as scheduled and
that uptime accurately reflected reality. ipnat -sv appeared normal
and the system log showed nothing out of the ordinary.

Although I currently do not have the hardware in-house to try it,
I see no reason why TA 119202 wouldn't work on AMD MP systems,
which I know from past experience suffered activity stops as well.

On April 23, SCO posted a BTLD kernel patch to their FTP site to
specifically address the activity stop problem. This patch may be
applied on a fresh install or to an already configured system. I
have not actually tried it but my examination of the files involved
suggests that it applies the remedy recommended in TA 119202. This
patch is applicable only to OSR 5.0.6. I have determined that the
activity stop issue does not exits in either OSR 5.0.6 or OSR 5.0.7.
 

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