How to solve: TF536 freezing with high frequency disk access
Posted: 02 Nov 2020 02:07
I know my debugging occurs over a geological era, but eventually I get round to it...
A while ago someone complained that his 536 was freezing when transferring specific types of files over the plipbox. I tried and failed to find that post so I am creating this one instead.
Well, I think I finally figured it out.
If you got a board from me with a CF card, I had it set up to load a patched scsi.device at boot. The advantage of this was supposed to be two-fold: 1) it copies it in fast ram on any type of cpu which speeds everything up and 2) it eliminates the 4GB barrier which reduced the risk that you are going to accidentally overwrite the RDB.
Unfortunately, that scsi.device seems to have some serious bugs which cause this issue precisely. This only occurs in specific conditions and with specific types of transfers.
The solution is simple, just comment out the relevant loadmodule line in the IF loop in the startup-sequence and the problem will automatically go away.
Sorry about that.
A while ago someone complained that his 536 was freezing when transferring specific types of files over the plipbox. I tried and failed to find that post so I am creating this one instead.
Well, I think I finally figured it out.
If you got a board from me with a CF card, I had it set up to load a patched scsi.device at boot. The advantage of this was supposed to be two-fold: 1) it copies it in fast ram on any type of cpu which speeds everything up and 2) it eliminates the 4GB barrier which reduced the risk that you are going to accidentally overwrite the RDB.
Unfortunately, that scsi.device seems to have some serious bugs which cause this issue precisely. This only occurs in specific conditions and with specific types of transfers.
The solution is simple, just comment out the relevant loadmodule line in the IF loop in the startup-sequence and the problem will automatically go away.
Sorry about that.