solution: "DECthreads bugcheck" on Alpha workstations

[Gershom (Jan M.L.) Martin]

Hello,

one of my students was complaining (well, yelling is a better word :-))
that MOLPRO2002 wouldn't run on our single-CPU Alpha workstations: it
produced the error message:
> %DECthreads bugcheck (version V3.16-023), terminating execution.
> % Reason:  Failure initializing the manager thread tcb (12)
> % Running on OSF1 V4.0 on , 1152Mb; 1 CPUs
> ***RECURSIVE BUGCHECK IN THREAD 1***
> ***CANNOT CONTINUE: REPORTED STATE MAY BE INACCURATE AND

The solution is as follows:
* with $DISPLAY set to a valid XWindows display,
  sudo dxkerneltuner (or, if one doesn't have sudo, su to root and then
  dxkerneltuner)
* go to the section named vm and double-click it
* one should find a parameter named vm-vpagemax, which for single-CPU
workstations is apparently set to 16384 by default. Crank it up to 65536
or more.
* exit, and confirm saving changes
* reboot the machine.

The Tru64 Unix kernel parameters are documented in
http://www.tru64unix.compaq.com/docs/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40F_HTML/AQ0R3GTE/CHLMTSXX.HTM
(in case you mailer truncates at 80 columns, here it is in two pieces
again:
http://www.tru64unix.compaq.com/docs/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V40F_HTML/
AQ0R3GTE/CHLMTSXX.HTM
)

Best regards
Jan
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
prof. Gershom (Jan M.L.) Martin           Computational Quantum Chemistry
         Department of Organic Chemistry/Sieff Building, Room 239
          Weizmann Institute of Science/IL-76100 Rechovot/ISRAEL
Email:       comartin at wicc.weizmann.ac.il           Phone: +972(8)9342533
Web site:  http://theochem.weizmann.ac.il/            FAX: +972(8)9344142
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