Crashing NeXTSTEP 3.3 in VMware Fusion

Hi, all.

I leave my OPENSTEP 4.2 and NeXTSTEP 3.3 VMs running 24x7, and I have noticed that the NS one crashes after running for a few days, whereas the OS one keeps running as long as I want it to.  I don't see anything obvious in system logs, so I am not sure what is causing the crashes.

Is anyone else seeing anything like this?  Any idea what I might be doing wrong?  Thanks.

What sort of crash is happening? NS itself, or is VMware locking up?

The only untoward behaviour problems I have with VMware is that using the sound drivers sometimes causes the VM to lock up.

Yes, I should have been more specific.  NS3.3 hangs, that's it.  I don't have the sound driver installed, because it crashes the VM, so I know that's not it.  When this happens, my NS VM has been sitting, doing nothing.

I have a cron job set to run every 5 minutes to run ntp to keep the time updated, because VMs are so bad at keeping time that you really need to do that.  I usually notice these hangs a day or two after they happen; the Preferences app's icon will show time and date from a day or two ago.

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Also, when this happens I cannot ping or telnet to the NS VM.  It is completely hung.

Well, the blatantly obvious thing is that the VM is locking up - beyond that, it might be really hard to ascertain what is happening.

There's probably nothing of interest in the vmware.log file, and absolutely zero useful stuff in NS' syslog either - as the instant it locks up, no more writes to the virtual disk take place.

What's the average uptime of your NS box when this occurs?  My NS3.3 VM has an uptime of 2 days 15 hour right now, so I'll keep an eye on it over the next day or so :)

Also, it might be an idea for us to compare VMware configs.

Quote from: "eagle"Yes, I should have been more specific.  NS3.3 hangs, that's it.  I don't have the sound driver installed, because it crashes the VM, so I know that's not it.  When this happens, my NS VM has been sitting, doing nothing.

I have a cron job set to run every 5 minutes to run ntp to keep the time updated, because VMs are so bad at keeping time that you really need to do that.  I usually notice these hangs a day or two after they happen; the Preferences app's icon will show time and date from a day or two ago.

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Also, when this happens I cannot ping or telnet to the NS VM.  It is completely hung.

Hello eagle,

you might try version 1.5 of my driver from my website http://mitglied.multimania.de/Morgon_de. There were some more memory problems I started to fix recently (there is still a flaw somewhere I haven't identified yet).
Maybe it helps with your problem. It's untested on NS 3.3 since I only run OS 4.2 on all my machines and the servers in our office (they have uptimes of more than 100 days at 24/7).

For your clock drift problem you can install the VMTools driver also found on the website. It uses VMwares internal functions to synchronize the guest clock to the host in a configurable interval (defaults to 60s). It's much more reliable that way than using ntp. Although it's named VMTools is can't do anything more than that time syncing (unfortunately pasteboard functions and all the other stuff the real vmtools do on other systems can't be accessed from within the NeXT-kernel).


Good luck!

Morgon

Morgon, thanks.  I'll update all of the drivers - vmxnet and vmmouse, and will install VMTools.  And I'll update the video driver as Andreas suggested in the other thread about changing resolution.

I don't have the sound driver installed since it doesn't work with Fusion 4. But, I wonder: if I run the VM in Fusion 2/3 compatibility mode, can I install the sound driver?  I should test that out.

Will let you guys know how I make out.

Quote from: "eagle"I don't have the sound driver installed since it doesn't work with Fusion 4. But, I wonder: if I run the VM in Fusion 2/3 compatibility mode, can I install the sound driver?  I should test that out.

Will let you guys know how I make out.

Don't think that compatibility mode will help with the issue with my SoundBlaster16PCI. I never updated the virtual hardware of my VMs (running at hw version 5 I think) and the VM still locks up when I have the driver installed (vmware 7 on linux).

Morgon

Morgon, thanks for the link.  I have now updated my NS3.3 VM with new versions of the mouse driver, the display driver, and network driver.  And, I have the display running at 1280x1024.  Thanks!

I installed the VM Tools config.  Is there anything I need to do to get that to work, or is it enough to simply open the config and have Configure.app install it?

Edit: Also, I did still have the Sound Blaster driver installed, so perhaps that was causing the crashes.  I'm going to let it run to see if it crashes again.

Well, I think I figured out why it was crashing, but it doesn't make sense and I have no way to be certain.

Apparently my NeXTSTEP 3.3 VM was still running sendmail as an open relay, and there were 3500 spam emails in the queue.  It's possible that sendmail was crashing.  What's worse is that my ISP account has been responsible for sending who knows how many spam emails. :(  Ah well, it's shut down now.  And, that brings up another task - I need to get postfix installed and running, and ssh/sshd, and many other things.

Hi Morgon!

impressive stuff (your drivers)! so you are capable of creating drivers based on available linux-code? would you mind making drivers for the network and maybe audio on the ALIX board? I even would pay for these  :wink:

ALIX board ->
http://pcengines.ch/alix1d.htm

also, see this thread about OPENSTEP running on ALIX ->
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2995

regards,
michael

Quote from: "mikeboss"Hi Morgon!

impressive stuff (your drivers)! so you are capable of creating drivers based on available linux-code? would you mind making drivers for the network and maybe audio on the ALIX board? I even would pay for these  :wink:

Short answer:
I'm sorry michael but I'm not able to write those drivers for you.

Long answer:
For the sound driver the architecture of the whole Linux sound system has undergone some very big changes making it impossible to adapt the current drivers as "easily" as I had done it when writing the SoundBlaster16PCI driver.
When I wrote that driver I just had to develop an adaption layer to glue together the nearly unmodified linux driver and the NeXT driver system. Today many parts that were in the old drivers have been moved to different parts of the kernel (so they can be used by multiple drivers). Due to that the interface I used for my driver has been spread across 20 and more files I would have to incorporate in my adaption layer to make it work again.
Beside that SB16PCI (ES 1371 chip) can do nearly all the sound processing in hardware on its own so the driver don't have to fiddle with any preprocessing. Modern hardware needs much more preprocessing in the driver. Even in the old times I would not been able to adapt a driver for SoundBlaster 128 PCI (10k chip set).

For network it's nearly the same. Since I wrote the VMXNet driver the interface to the Linux drivers has undergone some big changes (I had a look at it recently because I thought about porting the newer vmnet3 driver) making it impossible to simply adapt to other drivers (some of the lethal functions I use aren't there anymore). So any driver trying to adapt the new Linux kernel sources needs to be developed again from nearly zero.

Last and most important point is that I simply don't have any time to do anything time consuming like this anymore. When I wrote the SB16PCI I still had been at university with quite a lot of leisure time. By now I'm working full time and don't have much time for myself at all.

The VMware drivers had been different because I wrote them primarily for my company to get our NeXT server running inside newer versions of VMware (until VMware 4.5 standard NeXT drivers worked okay). So that was part of my administration work in our company. Due to that these are the only drivers that might get bug fixes if they affect the system in our office and I'm able to find the bug (as stated earlier there still is a flaw in the network driver I haven't found yet).

So again I'm sorry, but I can't help with your real hardware because of this. Once the old IDE interface vanishes and all is SATA with AHCI the disk drivers supplied with NS/OS will stop working as well since they just know old PATA IDE and nothing about AHCI.
That in mind it might worth thinking about a migration to virtual hardware as we did several years ago. We even run OpenStep within the free VMplayer on a Windows PC in our office (not the server though that's running on Linux).


Sorry if this got a bit long but I thought I should explain myself a bit (more) ;)


Cheers,
Morgon :)

Morgon, I wanted to say that I really appreciate what you have done with those drivers.  It really makes the OS useful some 24 years after its initial release.

I just wish the sound driver still worked, but of course that is an extremely low priority on anybody's list (mouse, display, and network are obviously much higher).

hi Morgon

thank you for your (detailed) answer. I almost expected something like this (you writing the drivers for commercial use or a company). but I thought: hey, it can't hurt to ask him  :wink:

I'm running OS 4.2 on the ALIXs just for fun and there's plenty of black hardware in my possession and of course I'm running NS 3.3 & OS 4.2 in VMware Fusion, too. here's a picture of my NeXTstation Mini ->

http://t.co/sj3eVvPa


regards,
michael

Quote from: "eagle"I installed the VM Tools config.  Is there anything I need to do to get that to work, or is it enough to simply open the config and have Configure.app install it?

It's enough to install it with Configure.app. Just make sure it is listed in the "Other devices" section. There is also some configuration dialogue for it letting you set the sync intervall and forcing an instant sync.

Morgon

Quote from: "mikeboss"I almost expected something like this (you writing the drivers for commercial use or a company). but I thought: hey, it can't hurt to ask him  :wink:

It sure is okay to ask :D. I try my best to help people with my drivers and other problems as well. But even in office the system administration I'm doing is just in addition to my main job as sales engineer in that company.

Morgon

Quote from: "Morgon"

Quote from: "eagle"I installed the VM Tools config.  Is there anything I need to do to get that to work, or is it enough to simply open the config and have Configure.app install it?

It's enough to install it with Configure.app. Just make sure it is listed in the "Other devices" section. There is also some configuration dialogue for it letting you set the sync intervall and forcing an instant sync.

Hmm, something must not be right on my system.  See these pics:









These screenshots are from my OS4.2 box, but the same thing happens on NS3.3  Any ideas about this?  Thanks!

Quote from: "eagle"

Hmm, something must not be right on my system.  See these pics:

...

These screenshots are from my OS4.2 box, but the same thing happens on NS3.3  Any ideas about this?  Thanks!

With these two steps you only installed the driver into the system driver directory. Now you need to add it as active driver to the system configuration.

For that go to the "Other Devices" section, click "Add...", then change the filter to "Show All Installed Drivers" as there is no detectable hardware associated with the driver, scroll down to "VMWare Toolbox (v1.0)" select that entry and click "Add" in the dialogue. Now the driver should be listed among those other drivers.

Finally click "Done" and save the new configuration. With the next reboot the driver should be installed. You can test this by entering "kl_util -s" in a terminal running as root. VMTools should be listed there together with VMXNet and VMMouse :)

Morgon

haha... can you tell that this is my first non-black NeXT experience? :)

I used NeXTSTEP from v2.1 to 3.3 on my black NeXT, and VMware Fusion is my first experience with NS/OS on Intel.  Thanks so much for all the help.

Edit - I have it configured now on OS.  Will do NS late.  Thanks so much.