Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!rice!sun-spots-request From: forsyth@minster.york.ac.uk Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun Subject: sun bug 1008635: hardware? software? fixed? Keywords: SunOS Message-ID: Date: 11 May 89 09:44:26 GMT Sender: usenet@rice.edu Organization: Sun-Spots Lines: 19 Approved: Sun-Spots@rice.edu Original-Date: 3 May 1989 18:25:32 GMT X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 7, Issue 282, message 18 of 19 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.