Uptime Baby!

[Jason]

Digital Wokan wrote:
> 
> Jason, you haven't quite gotten out of the mentality brought about by
> the use of certain closed source, market majority OS's have you.  The
> only Linux reboots people schedule are the ones that occur right after
> compiling a new kernel.

Hmm.. maybe. I used to have a hell of a time with Linux's sound
support eventually crapping out, before the Persistant Buffers option
was added to the sound driver. This is because the bottom 16MB of
memory gradually got crowded out, fragmented, etc. Rebooting was a
perfect way to solve this problem, and that box, which also worked as
a jukebox, was set to reboot every night at 3AM if it was unused for
the previous hour. 

I never did find a way to straighten out those bottom 16 megs without
a reboot however - once sound support had died completely, it was gone
for good. Up until that point, the sound driver would be able to
occasionally find increasingly smaller chunks of memory in the bottom
16M.

If I continued to use any other ISA device that requires DMA buffers,
and did not have an option to make the buffers persistant, I would
continue to run into this problem... which can apparently be solved
only be recoding the relevant driver to use persistant buffers or
rebooting every so often.

I knew I could think of at least one real-world example of the need
for this, it just took me a while. Bear in mind that upgrading wasnt
an option either.. at the time I was running into this problem, there
was absolutely no support for PCI sound in Linux. 

-- 
jkenner @ mindspring . com__
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