[MiNT] Problem with recent MiNT beta versions

[Mario Becroft <mb@tos.pl.net>]

I posted a message previously about this, but I have since made some more
observations.

The problem is that all kernels since the beta 1.1 do not work properly on
my TT. I have now also spoken to several other people who apparently have
similar problems.

I am using the beta 1.1 kernel now and everything is working fine. However
the newer versions 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 all fail. Well to be sure, they do not
fail entirely. What happens is like this.

To begin with, after booting the machine, everything seems to be well.
However after a little while (I have been unable to define this time
precisely, although it may be several hours or one or two days) problems
start appearing. The problems seem to specifically affect two programs,
uux and httpd, which crash at random when loading them. That is, when I
try to load httpd or uux, about 1 in 10 times it will crash with a bus
error. The other 9 in 10 times it works correctly. Once loaded correctly,
the program will never crash at a later time. I also observe that the
machine freezes at random, it usually freezes within a day or so of
booting it. When it has frozen, the machine does not respond to any user
input, and has to be rebooted.

None of the above happens with beta version 1.1 or earlier versions of
MiNT.

I suspect my description is too vague and unclear to serve as a basis for
finding the bug. If someone would kindly tell me what I can do to provide
a more helpful report, I will endevour to do that. It has been suggested
that I should increase the debug level and record all debugging output on
another machine connected to a serial port. I have not yet done this
because it is inconvenient, but I will see about doing it soon. Meanwhile
if there are any more easily implemented possibilities I will be pleased
to hear about them.

I suppose that some information about the computer would be useful. It is
an Atari TT with 32 MB of TT RAM and 4 MB of ST RAM (now reduced to 2 MB,
but at the time when the problems occured I had 4 MB; I have not tested it
since I reduced the amount of RAM). I have one 850 MB SCSI hard disc
drive. Following is the information from my mint.cnf file about how MiNT
is configured:

---
INIT=u:\usr\sbin\init
SLICES=1
SECURELEVEL=1
HIDE_B=YES

NEWFATFS=EF
VFAT=
WB_ENABLE=E
CACHE=1024

setenv TZ NZST-12
exec c:\multitos\tzinit
---

I had also been using MiNT with disc cache of 4096, but it failed in the
same way. I had reduced the cache size as a test in case this related to
the problem, but the problem was not affected by the reduced cache size.

If there is any other information I can provide, please tell me.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Mario Becroft                * Tariland, New Zealand Atari User Group |
| mb@tos.pl.net                * Atari Hardware Developments            |
| http://www.ak.planet.gen.nz/~mario/ * Atari Serial Mouse Interface    |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+