I’m using Phindows 2.00 on my office XP machine to try to
access two Neutrino 6.2.1 nodes located in a lab down the
hall. For the most part this works reasonably well but
Phindows seems a bit unstable. It consistently refuses to
redraw terminal windows that were covered up by some other
application (the help viewer say) when the covering
application is closed or moved and sometimes it seems to
stall for several 10’s of seconds during which time it is
unresponsive. But those are minor annoyances and by
themselves are not bothering me too much. My real problem
is more serious.
Once in a while Phindows will completely lockup and the only
way I’ve found to fix it is to use the Windows process
manager to kill the “phindows.exe” process and restart it.
While in its locked up state, several messages appear in the
title of the Phindows window. The messages are all of the
form:
Unknown type x, len y
where ‘x’ is 0, 1 or 2 (I’ve got the problem right now and
‘x’ is alternating back and forth between 0 and 2 about once
per second) and ‘y’ is usually zero but occasionally some
other value that flashes by so fast I can’t read it. I
should also mention that when in its locked up state,
Phindows consumes ~100% of the CPU its running on (as
reported by Windows Task Manager… which actually reports
it as ~50% since this is a dual-CPU system). Finally, the
lockups are not always permanent! If you’re patient enough
Phindows sometimes recovers but this can take 15 minutes or
more during which time it is busy eating 100% CPU and
displaying “Unknown type…” messages. But things are never
quite the same after “recovery”. Phindows seems unstable at
that point and likely to lock up again very quickly.
The two lab systems are running on generic desktop PCs with
~1GHz P-III processors. They are connected to the LAN
through 10MB Ethernets into a 10/100 switch into the subnet
router. They are on a separate subnet from my office PC.
Phindows accesses the systems over the LAN using TCP/IP.
Currently phrelay is being started by inetd with no command
line options.
The office system is a 2.4GHz dual-CPU Xeon machine running
Windows XP / Service Pack 1. Is the dual-CPU thing the
problem? Is Phindows 2.00 threaded?
Has anyone else seen this problem? It seems unlikely that
you haven’t since it happens on all three of the systems we
have running here (which, coincidentally are all dual CPU
systems). I did a reinstall of Phindows 2.00 freshly
downloaded from the QNX site just this morning in the hopes
that there may have been some minor bug fixes or something
that would make my problem go away. My old version was 2.00
as well, but you know how it is. Desperation had me
grasping at straws. Surprisingly, the new install does
seem to be a little more stable. I’ve only had it lock up
twice today whereas before it would lock up a couple dozen
times a day causing me to break my keyboard and threaten the
lives of my coworkers. Then again, it could be I’ve just
been lucky today.
In general I can’t point to one thing in particular that
causes it to lock up. This last time I had the Phindows
Help Viewer open, I was reading through the entry for
“crontab” and I clicked in the scrollbar area several times
in a row to get the page to scroll back up. That’s all it
took!
Unknown type 0, len 0
Unknown type 2, len 0
Unknown type 0, len 0
Unknown type 2, len 0
.
.
.
Unfortunately, the scroll bar usually works just fine so
this isn’t a good way to reproduce the error. I’ve also had
it lockup and go into “Unknown type …” mode at other times
not involving the help viewer. I wish I could narrow this
down but, so far at least, I just haven’t found anything
that will cause it to lockup reproducibly nor have I been
able to narrow it down to one application or type of
behavior that seems to cause it to lock up any more
frequently than any other.
This is very frustrating. I’m used to using Phindows 1.x
talking to QNX4 systems and, for us at least, that product
was rock solid. I’d work with it all day, every day from my
office PC (back then that was a single CPU system running
Windows NT) and never had one bit of trouble. Phindows 2.00
talking to QNX6 seems really shaky.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions,
Charlie Hubbard