2 ms·
Back in the day (8086) my idle loop would start at timer (2 sec) and if it expired without exiting idle, it would flush file system buffers. So if you powered o
by JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Back in the day (8086) my idle loop would start at timer (2 sec) and if it expired without exiting idle, it would flush file system buffers. So if you powered off without shutting down, the file system(s) would be consistent.
Also every couple of seconds it would 'wash' an ECC memory page. So the machine wouldn't accumulate single-bit errors over weeks of uptime. The hardware didn't do that for you back then.
After putting that stuff in, our incidence of corrupt file systems went way down!
- drudru 4y agoCan you tell us more about this system? ECC on an 8086 was rare.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoCTOS running on a 'MegaFrame' which had 6 processors on cards the size of a pizza box. Slid them in a case the size of a dishwasher. Each had 1MB(!) of RAM, all mappable into each others' address spaces.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAlso a desktop modular workstation, and NGen (Next Generations, hah). It went through 8086,186, 286 and 386 versions.