I’ve had this problem on one machine where to render a pov file, I sometimes
have to cd up one directory, then back or the file will render just a
100x100 black image. I had assumed it was a problem with that installation.
The hardware is a Tyan S2912 with one Opteron 2347HE processor, some RAM,
and a new Western Digital SATA hard drive. The problem persisted also if I
had the file on a USB flash drive. I’d have to cd up one level, then back
sometimes, but not always.
I’m not sure it’s specific to that machine. I have another machine with an
AMD 3200+, and some generic IDE hard drive that is having similar problems
running folding at home lately. It has resulted in random errors while
folding. It reads the files incorrectly as such:
tom@Minuet:~/Documents/folding_minuet_linux> ls -al
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 .
drwxrwxrwx 23 tom users 0 2010-03-05 20:29 …
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 client.cfg
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 fah6
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 FAH6.29-Linux.tgz
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 FahCore_b4.exe
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 FAHlog.txt
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 machinedependent.dat
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 mpiexec
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 MyFolding.html
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 queue.dat
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 unitinfo.txt
But, I can cd up one directory, then back, and it’s different!
tom@Minuet:~/Documents/folding_minuet_linux> ls -al
total 15640
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 16:39 .
drwxrwxrwx 23 tom users 0 2010-03-05 20:29 …
-rwxr-x— 1 tom users 191 2010-03-05 19:52 client.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 tom users 1104112 2010-01-21 10:25 fah6
-rw-r–r-- 1 tom users 568939 2010-03-05 19:50 FAH6.29-Linux.tgz
-rwxr-x— 1 tom users 14167648 2010-03-05 19:52 FahCore_b4.exe
-rwxr–r-- 1 tom users 40394 2010-03-06 16:38 FAHlog.txt
-rw-r–r-- 1 tom users 8 2010-03-05 19:51 machinedependent.dat
-rwx------ 1 tom users 68492 2007-07-16 13:02 mpiexec
-rw-r–r-- 1 tom users 5211 2010-03-05 19:52 MyFolding.html
-rwxr–r-- 1 tom users 7168 2010-03-05 21:16 queue.dat
-rwxr–r-- 1 tom users 152 2010-03-06 16:37 unitinfo.txt
drwxr-xr-x 4 tom users 0 2010-03-06 04:37 work
drwxrwxrwx 2 tom users 0 2010-03-05 20:24 work_old
tom@Minuet:~/Documents/folding_minuet_linux>
Is the ext4 filesystem flaky or something else? The drive doesn’t seem to
matter. Both machines are running Opensuse 11.2 with all the updates. The
former boots into run-level 3 and the latter into KDE4.3.5. Both are
desktops.