Possible mouse/ATA problems in -STABLE

[Mike Harding]

I rebuilt the world without CPUTYPE=686 and tried again...

The CPUTYPE flag doesn't appear to make any difference - a large
recursive copy still causes the mouse to lose sync.  KB/t is still >
64.00.

- Mike H.

On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 00:03, Luoqi Chen wrote:
> > Sorry if this is confusing - the history, from my end at least, goes
> > like this:
> >
> > - my mouse started getting 'flaky' around Sept. 1.  I was get 'psmintr'
> > sync errors, and sometimes the mouse would get disabled, necessitating a
> > reboot.  I have seen the psmintr errors occasionally before, but never
> > had the mouse disappear.  This started happening right after I saw some
> > ATA changes in my cvsup, so I suspect ATA changes, committed (by luoqi)
> > on Sept. 5 and after.  The mouse had been rock solid for at least a year
> > before this.
> > - The were some 'mfc' comments in the ATA code specifically in the DMA
> > code, sorry to rope Soren into this... the changes don't necessarily
> > have anything to do with -current, but the comments on ata-dma.c, rev
> > 1.35.2.33 did say MFC.
> > - I was suprised to see -any- ATA changes during code slush...
> > - The mouse seems to fail during heaving IDE activity, such as when I do
> > a release build and the /usr/ports/distfiles gets copied.  This is a
> > high throughput situation, it's possible that the IDE code is now
> > hogging the interrupt.  When the mouse gets confused 'systat -vmstat'
> > shows a sustained rate of about 100KB/transfer.
> > - I do have a 'cursed' VIA 686b motherboard, which has caused mucho
> > problems (like silent disk corruption) in the past until I found a bios
> > (from Brazil!) that fixed it.  This problem may only occur on machines
> > like mine, but I did not have a problem until recently.
> >
> > Sorry to make so much noise right now, I just know that things like this
> > tend to get fixed -right after- the release when a bigger population
> > actually uses the system.
> >
> > - Mike H.
> >
> Mike, I'm looking into this problem now. I'd like to get more info on the
> system with the reported problem, /var/run/dmesg.boot and a copy of your
> kernel config would be very helpful. I've also have a couple of questions,
> 1. You mentioned transfer rate of 100KB/t, this is certainly not archievable
>    by a single disk, our physical i/o size is limited to 64KB/t. Is this
>    the sum of more than one disk? Are you using an IDE raid?
> 2. At the time you're having mouse trouble, what's the % of cpu time spent
>    in interrupt as shown in the `systat -vm' window?
> 3. Are you using tagged queue?
> 4. Is there any chance that your disk(s) were running in PIO mode instead
>    (maybe as a result of DMA transfer failure)?
> 5. I searched the @stable list and saw your postings about jumpy mouse
>    a month earlier. Is the problem getting worse now?
> 
> Thanks
> -lq