Re: First Annual EMC Users meeting?

[Matt Shaver <mshaver-at-erols.com>]

Ray wrote:


> Ray nominated Matt to serve as Chair of a steering committee.  The rather
> interrupted/fragmented vote confirmed Matt with three favorable and one
> opposed.

I've thought about demanding a recount ;)


> No firm bylaws were discussed and no purposes for the group or steering
> committee were formulated but all within range of this message are
> encouraged to support Matt and this initiative.
> 
> Matt?

Well, lately things have gone pretty well on the EMC front. The biggest 
advance lately has been Paul Corner's BDI CD which may finally get us 
past the "it's too hard to install" problem. Ray did a test install on a 
computer I brought to NAMES, and after answering a few questions the 
install was completed in less than 8 minutes. A few folks have reported 
problems with certain video cards, but overall it's a great success.

The next goal has to be rock-solid reliability. I know Jon Elson and 
perhaps a few other users are using 2.0.36/0.9J/dec-1999 systems because 
of random lockups experienced with the later kernel, RT, and EMC 
versions. We've got to get to the bottom of this! Ray Henry has been 
doing a lot of experiments trying to reproduce the problem and has had 
some luck in causing the lockups (see his e-mails for details). I've got 
a PC that I brought to NAMES which is now scratch and I'm going to load 
the BDI and try to confirm Ray's observations. Since the problem results 
in a hard lockup of the PC, Dave Engvall opined that we might need a 
hardware debugger or (gulp) an emulator to track down the problem. I do 
recall a simpler method of regaining control of a hung PC. What you do 
is hook the NMI vector and point to your own monitor code. When you lose 
control, it's possible to assert NMI by yanking on the I/O Channel Check 
pin on the ISA bus. What you do from there to find the problem, I don't 
know...

I'll report back when the problem is reproducable for me and/or when I 
think up some more ideas.

Thanks,
Matt