[9fans] corrupted update on 9vx

["EBo" <ebo@sandien.com>]

OK.  I've been trying to track down the odd 9vx crash and discovered some
other oddities and request some guidance in what might be causing the pull to
become corrupted and installing entire blocks of nil's in updated files.

Following details outlined in
http://fixunix.com/plan9/501128-9fans-pull-9vx.html, I first tried to update
the original plan9 distro, then moved to a new 9atom.iso.  To get the pull to
work I had to update the network and client db:

# cp -a plan9/dist/replica/client/plan9.* root9atom/dist/replica/client/
# cp -a plan9/dist/replica/network root9atom/dist/replica/network

Then I ran /usr/glenda/bin/rc/pull.  At one point it seemed to work until I
decided to recompile a couple of the commands in /sys/src/cmd and discovered
that several of the source files had blocks of nil's in them.  I wanted to see
if the problem was systematic or more random, so I saved that root tree and
reran the test.  What I found is that the corruption happens very often and at
seemingly random files and locations.  I also wanted to check to see if these
differences were consistent (like 4K blocks, etc).  I found that the number of
corrupted blocks, and their respective lengths, vary.  I also found that they
are not guaranteed to be multiples of 512.

These tests were so far run on my AMD x86_64.  I'll try rerunning these tests
on an Intel based laptop to see if this is some weird x86_64'ism.  I will also
try the Tvx code compiled for i486 on both machines

Does anyone have an idea what could be causing replica to behave so?  Has
anyone ever seen this behavior before?

  Thanks and best regards,


  EBo --