Crash on Symbolics LISP Engineering

Symbolics XL LAN Challenges

Wed, 05 May 2021 22:26:17 +0000

I recently set up a LAN of my three XL Symbolics machines at home. The XL1201 which was having stability issues has been largely stabilized (thanks to help from David Schmidt). I will post more about this LAN soon, but I thought I would mention an interesting problem.

The machines connect to the LAN via an AUI to 10BaseT transceiver, to my core LAN which is a mixed 10G/1G LAN. The core router is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Pro which is attached to UNMS, their central management tool. When I connected these machines to the LAN, I was getting Merlin (the name of the CPU board) Ethernet errors on occasion, and eventually the computer would crash. I put the Symbolics computers on a separate segment connected only to a small Netgear switch and the EdgeRouter, but the computers kept crashing.

More XL1201 Crashes

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 03:56:51 +0000

Well, tonight I had more crashes using the XL1201. Each time the computer crashed after about 20 minutes. This indicates to me that there’s something odd going on somewhere.

Before the first crash, I put the Fluke 289 on 1-second measurement mode of the 5V rail. It was steady the whole time, even after the first crash at 20 minutes.

I then took a few hours break.

Later, I removed both Merlin II and Merlin I/O cards, put contact cleaner on all the socketed chips, and pushed down on them.

Multiple Crashes

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 17:34:46 +0000

I have been having a hell of a time today with the XL1201. It keeps crashing to the FEP from Genera. Very frustrating. You can Continue but it will crash again very soon afterwards.

Does anyone have any ideas, please?

Lisp stopped itself
Error trap 1001032504 not in emulator mode at #<DTP-EVEN-PC 37001102553> referencing #<DTP-PHYSICAL-ADDRESS 00001310200>.
(Use :Debug and c-M to record more information for a bug report.)
FEP Command: Debug (Keywords)
Error trap 1001032504 not in emulator mode at #<DTP-EVEN-PC 37001102553> referencing #<DTP-PHYSICAL-ADDRESS 00001310200>.
SI:AUX-HALT (PC = 40)
 --Defaulted args:--
 Arg 0 (SYS:FEP-COMMAND-STRING): NIL
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