From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 23 13:02:24 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id NAA00764 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 13:02:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ki.net (ki.net [205.150.102.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id NAA00744 Tue, 23 Apr 1996 13:02:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from freebsd.ki.net (root@freebsd.ki.net [205.150.102.51]) by ki.net (8.7.4/8.7.4) with ESMTP id QAA07218; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 16:01:40 -0400 (EDT) Received: from localhost (scrappy@localhost) by freebsd.ki.net (8.7.5/8.7.5) with SMTP id QAA23237; Tue, 23 Apr 1996 16:02:05 -0400 (EDT) X-Authentication-Warning: freebsd.ki.net: scrappy owned process doing -bs Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 16:02:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "Marc G. Fournier" To: current@freebsd.org cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Intelligent Debugging Tools... Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi... What would it take to either create software for debugging hardware, and/or add appropriate debugging to the kernel that would improve debugging of hardware problems? Erk...as far as software is concerned, maybe something that you could run in single user mode that would completely thrash the RAM, doing read/writes to *all* the memory looking for any corruption? Or something else that could be turned on against /dev/rsd0b to totally thrash the swap space on a drive? As far as the kernel is concerned, I'm getting panics in VM and keep getting told its hardware problems...fine, but there *has* to be a better way of isolating the problem then replacing bits and pieces until the problem seems to go away. For instance, when I get a VM fault...what exactly *is* the problem? Is it a problem with the swap space (ie. hard drives) or RAM? My -stable machine is a 4 month old computer, and all the parts are new in her...last I've been asked is "when am I going to replace the machine"...replace it with what? its all new...if there was some way of narrowing down the offending parts and replacing those, that would be great...but just going out and buying a new machine is not the answer, cause the part that is wrong with *this* machine might exist in the next machine *shrug* Does this make any sense? Marc G. Fournier scrappy@ki.net Systems Administrator @ ki.net scrappy@freebsd.org