Re: [amd64] Instability worse than ever

From: Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads_at_cox.net>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 06:58:23 -0500 (CDT)
On 25-Jul-2004 Brian Fundakowski Feldman wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2004 at 08:33:57PM -0500, Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
>> 
>> On 25-Jul-2004 Scott Long wrote:
>> > Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
>> > 
>> >> For the last couple of days, my amd64 box has taken to
>> >> spontaneously rebooting.  No panic, no coredump, nothing in
>> >> logs, just reboots.
>> >> 
>> >> These always seem to occur just as I'm clicking on something
>> >> under GNOME.
>> >> 
>> >> Very mysterious!

Happened again this morning.  Waking the machine up from DPMS sleep
mode, it went straight into a reboot.  :-(

>> > Do you have INVARIANTS turned on?
>> 
>> No, I really should do that.  Don't know why I hadn't already.  Duh.
>> :-)
>> 
>> > If you do, would you be able to hook up a serial console and see
>> > what the kernel is saying?
>> 
>> Been meaning to ask about that.  Would a null modem connection from
>> my other machine be useable as the serial console?  I have all the
>> kernel config options and the sio flags set to enable the serial
>> console, but wasn't sure if that would work or not.  If so, I could
>> try that.
> 
> Absolutely; I just set this up a few days ago, so I know this works
> with -CURRENT.
> First, set the sio.0.flags hint in /boot/device.hints to
> "0x90" so it is a vailable for use as a serial console.  Then, set up
> the kernel with DDB and KDB and set /etc/sysctl.conf to turn the
> debug.debugger_on_panic switch to 1.  You should probably be running
> with at least WITNESS and INVARIANTS, but not necessarily DIAGNOSTIC.

OK, I've built a new kernel (after cvsup) with INVARIANTS and WITNESS
enabled, and double-checked my serial debugging setup, however, it's
just occurred to me that this probably isn't going to help very much in
this particular situation, as I already had debug.debugger_on_panic
enabled, and the system still just went directly to a reboot, bypassing
the debugger altogether.

Still, perhaps WITNESS may at least provide a clue.  Let's hope so.  :-)

-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads_at_cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"
Received on Mon Jul 26 2004 - 09:58:28 UTC

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