And "debacle" is really the only word for Viking. A major rite of passage in kernel development in the 1990s was finding your first Viking bug; I found mine within a month of joining in 1996 (a logic bug whereby psr.pil was not honored for the three "settling" nops following wrpsr, allowing a low priority interrupt to tunnel in -- affecting all sun4m/sun4d CPUs). Bonwick's was still the king of the hill, though: he was the one who discovered that the i-cache wasn't grounded out properly, causing instructions with enough zeros in them to flip a bit (!!). The story of tracking that one down (branches would go to the wrong place) was our equivalent of the Norse sagas, an oral tradition handed down from engineer to engineer over the generations. Good times!
And "debacle" is really the only word for Viking. A major rite of passage in kernel development in the 1990s was finding your first Viking bug; I found mine within a month of joining in 1996 (a logic bug whereby psr.pil was not honored for the three "settling" nops following wrpsr, allowing a low priority interrupt to tunnel in -- affecting all sun4m/sun4d CPUs). Bonwick's was still the king of the hill, though: he was the one who discovered that the i-cache wasn't grounded out properly, causing instructions with enough zeros in them to flip a bit (!!). The story of tracking that one down (branches would go to the wrong place) was our equivalent of the Norse sagas, an oral tradition handed down from engineer to engineer over the generations. Good times!