#: 21240 S12/OS9/68000 (OSK)
    20-Oct-95  11:24:50
Sb: #OS9 3.0 crashes if ...
Fm: Rainer Thieringer 100544,1230
To: All

Hello,

the last few weeks I've had serious trouble with OS9/68000. I hope this message
will prevent anyone out there from spending lonely nights face to face with a
crashed system.

Scenario 1: A board in my system produces asynchronous interrupts.
Unfortunately the interrupt level switched to the VME bus had intermediate
states (e.g. IRQ 6 was for a few us an IRQ 2). This should be reported as
SPURIOUS IRQ followed by a system reset if not handled by a user trap (or 3.0's
SpurIRQ flag). What I've had was a total CRASH !!! Not even ROMBUG could help.
I (and my hardware vendor) suppose that this SPURIOUS IRQ message will not
appear, if immediately after the first (bad) IRQ another (good) IRQ happens.
This crashes OS-9 completely.

Workaround: a) I set the SpurIRQ-flag in the init modules COMPAT Byte to ignore
Spurious IRQs. b) I jumpered the board with IRQ 2 so that no intermediate IRQ
states could happen.


Scenario 2: Together with that SpurIRQ flag I set the PrivAlm flag which should
keep OS-9 from accidentialy deleting foreign alarms. After I did so I've had
system crashes (w/o any notification) every couple of minutes. After resetting
the flag everything worked fine again. As I've heard on the SYSTEMS this is an
know bug. Microware offers an update.

BUT ONCE AGAIN MICROWARE DID NOT INFORM US DEVELOPERS ABOUT A KNOWN BUG!


I hope this was the last serious surprise with 3.0x (knock on wood).





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