Re: Kernel panic - never had one before, what do I do?

On Wednesday 26 March 2003 07:54 pm, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Wednesday, 26 March 2003 at 13:35:28 +0000, Jason Morgan wrote:
> > I just got a panic. As I have never had one before, I don't know what to
> > do. It's on another system so I don't have to reboot immediately (that
> > would solve the problem temporarily, wouldn't it?) if someone would give
> > me some advice, I could try to help debug it; however, as I'm not a
> > coder (not a real one anyway), I don't know how much help I would be.
> >
> > It's a 5.0-CURRENT system, just installed and built last week. It
> > paniced right after doing a source update (not a build, just cvsup).
> > The panic error is as follows:
> >
> > panic: mtx_lock() of spin mutex vnode interlock _at_
> > /usr/src/sys/kern/vfs_subr.c:3187
>
> Take a look at http://www.lemis.com/texts/panic.txt or
> http://www.lemis.com/texts/panic.pdf and tell me if that helps.  This
> will be going into the new edition of "The Complete FreeBSD" in a few
> days time, so I'm interested in getting something which is helpful.

Hi Greg,

I've been looking at doing the same thing, learn how to capture a crash dump, 
and analyze it etc.  I'm a definite newbie at that so I thought it would be a 
good test for the article.  It's pretty readable, but I had a problem with 
enabling the crash dump as noted:
To enable dumping, put something like this in /boot/loader.conf:

dumpdev=/dev/ad0s1b

that gives an error that is similiar to:
WARNING: syntax error on file /boot/loader.conf
dumpdev=/dev/ad0s1b
              ^

the same syntax in /etc/rc.conf worked fine, however.

This was on 4.8 RC2, but the syntax error appeared on a recent -current too.

Thanks,
Tim