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From: sater@cs.vu.nl (Hans van Staveren)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Cnews: relaynews getting 'illegal instruction' on SparcStation 1
Message-ID: <4757@sater.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 11 Dec 89 15:21:48 GMT
Organization: V.U. Informatica, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Lines: 33

I am testing Cnews on a SparcStation 1 we have lying around as a spare
before unleashing it on our unsuspecting users. It does seem to run,
sort of, but relaynews is getting 'illegal instruction' dumps seemingly
at random. Here is one stacktrace:
newshost% adb /usr/lib/newsbin/relay/relaynews
core file = core -- program ``relaynews''
$SIGILL 4: illegal instruction
c
_sanitise() + 0
_history(0xf7fffd10,0x1000000,0x1,0x13840,0x2000,0x15d20) + 18
_insart(0xf7fffd10,0xf7fffd58,0xe582,0x169c8,0x169cc,0x15c18) + 48
_cpinsart(0xfff0,0xe582,0x2218,0x1,0x15a58,0xf7fffd10) + 9c
_unbatch(0xfff0,0xe582,0x0,0x10018,0x0,0x15a60) + 120
_process(0xfff0,0xe582,0x1,0xf400,0x15a38,0x23) + 60
_procargs(0x3,0xf7ffff5c,0xf7fffef0,0x15a68,0x0,0x0) + 28
_main(0x3,0xf7ffff5c,0xf7ffff6c,0xe400,0x0,0x0) + a0

The strange part is that there is of course no illegal instruction at that
address, and when you run relaynews on the same file again it functions
without problems. I sort of suspect hardware/OS trouble, but before I
try it on one of our many other spare machines :-) I would be interested
in comments of people that already run Cnews on SparcStation 1.

Our configuration:
SS1 with 8Mb, CDC Wren IV as SCSI target 0, meaning sd3 for SunOS.
SunOS 4.0.3c operating system.

One minor nit: if relaynews crashes, leaving a LOCK around, it would
be kind of nice if newsrun detected that, and would remove the LOCK.
Better of course would be relaynews not crashing, but I seriously doubt
whether I can blame the authors for this one.

	Hans van Staveren