[OpenIndiana-discuss] Unbootable hipster upgrade with Nvidia USB investigation

[Nikola M]

On 10/18/17 07:27 PM, Gary Mills wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2017 at 10:53:44AM -0500, Gary Mills wrote:
>> What's significant here is that a timer error can affect the USB
>> controller.  The same thing could happen in illumos, even though the
>> kernels are quite different.
> I found a workaround that enabled me to boot and run the hipster BE
> that I upgraded last month.  The BIOS of this system contained an item
> called `HPET Support'.  It was enabled.  I disabled it.  After that
> change, the SOF error messages did not appear.  The the USB keyboard
> and USB mouse worked normally.

I have hit something similar to this before, with older (Pentium, C2D 
era) Intel machine ,
and while suffering large CPU use for long time, I found the trace on Oi 
HCL on Wiki,
that "Enhanced Intel Speedstep Technology" (CPU EIST Function) needs to 
be turned OFF and then everything seemed normal back again (except that 
CPU then started working without lowering the speed all the time).
It seems to me that all those bugs were acquired in illumos over time, 
e.g. are broken and not reported on time or close to time of the 
introduction.

For example, for some time, I was using that machine as a router/gateway 
and when i started using it again as a desktop and started reporting 
something is wrong on IRC, already a lot of time passed to catch exact 
timeframe/change that caused it, without recompiling older illumoses and 
trzing out exact moment when it started to happen.

It happened again to me, when I were now in turn, using Desktop for some 
time, and when I turned back to using laptop, I figured that some change 
between January and April made my Core2Duo laptop use lagre cpu time, 
freezing some (random) process .
So if not keeping (large) OI hister mirror with all the compiled 
binaries from the beginning of the year, only way is to recompile it and 
catch again the time when it started to happen , pinpointing the change.
Need I to say, I still use old BE because of it, and it's time consuming 
compiling old illumoses and there's probably some better way to debug it..

Only alternative is to report bug as soon as it is witnessed and to 
pinpoint it when there are still binary osnet-incorporation and 
userland-incorporation (needed to be updated in pairs...) to try out 
when it started to happen, before they are all wiped for disk space 
usage, after OI hipster snapshot landing.