sun bug 1008635: hardware? software? fixed?

forsyth at minster.york.ac.uk forsyth at minster.york.ac.uk
Thu May 11 19:44:26 AEST 1989


The Sun Technical Bulletin (Dec. 1988) includes the following report:

	Reference Number: 1008635
	Release: 3.2, 3.4, 3.5
	Synopsis: possible cache problem on 3/280

	Description:
	        Possible cache problems on 3/200 machines seem to cause
	        abnormal behaviour when the system is required to `page'
	        heavily.  The presence of an `ie1' card also seems to
	        contribute significantly to the occurance [sic] of failure.

Has the trouble been traced?  Was it hardware or software?  Has it been
fixed?  What was the ``abnormal behaviour''?  One application that pages
energetically sees a block of 16 bytes on a 0 mod 16 boundary cleared to
zero.  It is unpredictable by time, and location in the data space.  The
machine has an ie1 (all our 3/280s have an ie1).   16 bytes on a 16 byte
boundary sounds remarkably like a cache line to me.  Could the trouble be
a missing vac_*flush?  The program does not fail on a 3/50.



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