Re: 2.4. continues after Aieee...

[Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>]

Rogier Wolff wrote:
> Dennis wrote:
> > network card driver) and leave the system running make linux unusable in
> > unattended environments as the machine is functionally dead.
> 
> Which doesn't help in this case, as your network card COULD be dead,
> while the system simply hasn't crashed....

Not every case causes a panic either.  This week, I had an instance of
an i686 box lock solid with a DFE-530TX net card.  Rebooting/power
cycling it didn't recover it (despite it working for the past month
without any problems).  It only started working again after I moved
it into a different PCI slot.

I've seen a couple of instances now on totally different hardware where
it is possible to lock a PCI bus solid by improper connections on some
of the PCI bus lines, so a faulty PCI socket seem to be the most likely
cause.

In this case, a "panic" doesn't help you; the machine experiances a
hardware lockup.  To catch these, you'd need a hardware watchdog.

What I'm basically saying is that there is only a limited amount that
Linux (or any OS) can do against these types of hardware failure.  If
you need better protection, try a hardware with user-space policy
implementations.
   _____
  |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
  |   |         Russell King        rmk@arm.linux.org.uk      --- ---
  | | | | http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html   /  /  |
  | +-+-+                                                     --- -+-
  /   |               THE developer of ARM Linux              |+| /|\
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