ROM 2015-09-01

On a Raspberry Pi Mk1 today’s ROM, 5.23 (01 Sep 2015), the RAM Disc can be greater than 128MB and briefly tested is OK there is some instability on the Pi that is not there with the ROM previously in use, 5.23 (24 Aug 2015). But there is a but ….

NetSurf stiffs, taking the whole machine down, fairly readily but not reproducibly, it stalls on a page change or download with a small NetSurf frozen hourglass. NetFetch fell over with a no room in RMA error followed by a terminal FileCore in use error, that’s not reproducible either. The Pi is usually very stable, there is something not quite the full biscuit with today’s ROM, normality returns on a return to the previous ROM.

If I can get any better diagnostics I will post them later.

I did check in some fairly significant changes to the memory management, so it’s not too unsurprising that there are a couple of bugs that have slipped through the net. I’ll take a look at things when I get home.

Cheers!

I did check in some fairly significant changes to the memory management

I was aware of that, it is why I had a look, no probs anyway, it is a beta, and I have a spare card with yesterday on it. Can’t really go wrong.

The nearest to repeatability so far is to run MessengerPro which fails with a data abort at &FC2167F4, which after a reboot *where’s as &23D4 in BCMVideo. Trying to move on from the first error gives a show stopping “FileCore in use” error followed by “The area of memory reserved for relocatable modules is full”.

I think this should be fixed now – or at least the most obvious problem is. Wimp_ClaimFreeMemory was still allowing the free pool to be claimed, but since it has no logical mapping anything that tried using it (like FileCore) would crash (and leave the free pool locked, causing further issues like the RMA full error). Luckily Wimp_ClaimFreeMemory has been deprecated since RISC OS 3.5, so I don’t think there’ll be any major issues if I stop it from working if the free pool is a PMP (any well-written code should have a fallback path for if the call fails, since it’s always been a single-user resource)

I think this should be fixed now

I have installed the 15-09-02 ROM on the Mk1 Pi and it hasn’t fallen into any of yesterday’s holes.

It’s looking good ATM. Many thanks.