Intermittent Lock-Ups
Posted: Thu Jun 04, 2015 3:08 am
I have implemented a ray tracing application for the Parallella Desktop. After setting up the scene and initializing the Epiphany cores, the host polls a flag in the 'leader' core which signals that rendering has completed. The Epiphany cores access the scene data and a pixel buffer in shared DRAM.
The application completes the majority of the time, but occasionally the Parallella locks up and I am forced to cycle the power. Sometimes the lock-ups occur almost immediately, and other times they occur several minutes into a long render (why these simple renderings are taking several minutes is another matter entirely...). The application can run happily for >30 minutes, or it might lock up after 1 second, so it's hard to tell what's going on.
I'm at a loss as to why these lock-ups are occurring. I'm wondering if it could be a temperature issue, or some kind of memory corruption. I'm not sure if it's possible for the Epiphany cores to interfere with the ARM cores. I've placed a sleep in the polling loop to reduce the system burden of the busy loop, and the host CPU doesn't seem to be under excessive load when the Epiphany program is doing its thing.
If anyone has any troubleshooting suggestions, I would love to hear them.
The application completes the majority of the time, but occasionally the Parallella locks up and I am forced to cycle the power. Sometimes the lock-ups occur almost immediately, and other times they occur several minutes into a long render (why these simple renderings are taking several minutes is another matter entirely...). The application can run happily for >30 minutes, or it might lock up after 1 second, so it's hard to tell what's going on.
I'm at a loss as to why these lock-ups are occurring. I'm wondering if it could be a temperature issue, or some kind of memory corruption. I'm not sure if it's possible for the Epiphany cores to interfere with the ARM cores. I've placed a sleep in the polling loop to reduce the system burden of the busy loop, and the host CPU doesn't seem to be under excessive load when the Epiphany program is doing its thing.
If anyone has any troubleshooting suggestions, I would love to hear them.