System hangs and USB disconnects/reconnects with Passmark v8?

[sholmes]

I'm doing some build verification on a system and found that when I run Passmark v8 the the system will hang about every 70 seconds and the USB host disconnects and reconnects before returning to normal operation.

Does not happen with Passmark v7.

I've updated the chipset drivers to the latest available. I've made sure peripherals have latest drivers from their manufacturers as well.

The system is an NCR 7403 Point of Sale.
Window 7 (POSReady7)
Intel Core 2 Duo (2.4HHz)
4GB Ram

Have you seen this before? What changed between the two that would effect USB connectivity this way?

Thanks,
Scott

[David (PassMark)]

We haven't seen this before and we have tested on dozens of machines.

On the other hand, we never did any testing on POSReady7 or a NCR 7403 POS machine.

You can find a list of changes here,
http://www.passmark.com/products/pt_history.htm

But I am not sure which one would provoke this issue. There isn't anything that happens at 70 second intervals as far as I know. You are talking about our PerformanceTest V8 software, right?

[sholmes]

Hi, David.

Yes, it is v8 of PassMark.

I'm not sure where the 70 seconds (this is approximate, timed with cell phone) is coming from either. I'm also working with the hardware manufacturer to see if there is something polling at that interval.

I suspect there is a DLL being used by PassMark that perhaps another service is trying to use. Unfortunately event viewer isn't showing any issues.

Thanks for the link. I'll take a look and see if anything stands out.

-Scott

[sholmes]

The engineers at NCR Provided some feedback.. Looks like v8 and their own system utilities are both using the SMBUS to monitor motherboard resources (temperature, fan speed, etc).

The SMBUS only allows one process at a time to access which means the process must ask permission and then lock it. PerformanceTest 8.0 and ncrusb.sys (NCR Utility) are both contending for access to the SMBUS.

[David (PassMark)]

It is true we use the SMBus to collect the specification information from the RAM modules.

But we only do this once. Not every 70 seconds.

And I can't see how this would be related to a USB problem. USB devices are not connected via the SMBus. Or are you saying that ncrusb.sys is behaving badly and doing something it shouldn't to the USB ports when it can't get immediate access to the SMBus?

[sholmes]

I think the conflict happens because the SMBus monitors USB for connection and status information. If the SMBus is locked by a process perhaps that is why USB is affected when a different process trys to use it.

Does PassMark try to maintain connectivity to the SMBus? Like for monitoring temperatures or fan speeds?

I'm reasonably sure that NCR is going to try to reconnect to gather the same info for logging purposes.

I do have a way to turn the NCR process off now.

You can disable ncrusb.sys from accessing the SMBUS by modifying the c:\program files\NCR\Config\PortIO\Bristol_HWM.busio file. Change the line that starts with “PerScript = ….” to “#Perscript =”, save the file, and reboot.

[David (PassMark)]

Does PassMark try to maintain connectivity to the SMBus?

Not in our PerformanceTest software.