5.18 stability

I hate to be the sower of the seeds of FUD, but…

I put the 5.18 softload on my Iyonix at the weekend, and last night began a (long overdue) backup of the Iyonix’s hard drive to NAS. The drive contains something like 22 GiB of files, so a full backup is a pretty good thrashing.

The Iyonix locked up completely, three times. Total lock, not even mouse cursor movement. It never does that normally.

How has 5.18 been for everybody else?

How are you backing up?

Straight copy to NAS using LanMan98.

On the ROOL web site the stable Beagle version of RISC OS is shown as

Beagle 5.18 stable
2012-02-24 16:04:55

RISC OS 5.18 (16 Jan 2012)

On the ARMini running OS5.18 OS_ReadSysInfo,8 gives a build date of Mon,20 Feb 2012.20:13:41.

The 16 Jan 2012 is just the date of the Utility Module.

The 16 Jan 2012 is just the date of the Utility Module.

I thought that problem had been fixed – clearly not quite. Development builds now show the date of build not that of the Utility module. Stable versions seem to revert to the previous practice.

ISTR ROOL guys mentioning on Saturday that this is something they’ll look into when they can get to it.

ISTR ROOL guys mentioning on Saturday that this is something they’ll look into when they can get to it.

It’s easy enough to change which dates are shown. The “Version” file in the kernel sources decides what version number and date is shown for the utility module, and the “UseNewFX0Error” option in hdr.Options controls whether *FX 0, OS_Byte 0, and the switcher display the ROM build date or the utility module date.

Supposedly it was a marketing decision for stable/release versions of the OS to display a fixed date (see here), so when I added the code to make it use the ROM build date I assumed we’d be sticking with the original system for release versions.

Back to the original topic – I haven’t got round to flashing 5.18 yet, but since my Iyonix is also well overdue for a backup I should have ample opportunity to look into any stability issues (although I’m using Sunfish for backups instead of LanMan)

What has gone wrong please?

Um, nothing. The freeze was on the 16th Jan, various candidates were tested for a month, the result was uploaded to the website on 24th Feb after 1 month and 8 days of testing.

My Windows XP machine says ©2001 but it was updated last night, and I’m not confused.

On the stability issue my OS5.18 Iyonix has just transferred some 15GBs to a NAS with LanMan98 2.05 perfectly.

On the stability issue my OS5.18 Iyonix has just transferred some 15GBs to a NAS with LanMan98 2.05 perfectly.

Good to hear. Is that the softload or the flash? (In case it should make any difference.)

Is that the softload or the flash?

Flash.

An update: I’ve flashed 5.18 and installed the latest version of LanMan98. I have completed a backup of the Iyonix to NAS without issues. So one and/or the other has sorted the problem.