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Date:      Sun, 26 Aug 2001 16:45:26 -0600 (MDT)
From:      Alex Varju <varju@antiflux.org>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   4.4-rc instability
Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.21.0108261603170.9348-100000@okcomputer.antiflux.org>

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Hi there,

I have been running FreeBSD-stable for several years now, and things have
been relatively reliable.  A few days ago, both of my main machines
started crashing intermittently.  I had done a buildworld for each of them
within the last two weeks, although they are not running from the same
code snapshot.

For the first machine, the errors first started as signal 11 core dumps
for random processes.  Things were bad enough that I decided a reboot
might be in order.  The next morning when I returned to the machine, it
had panicked overnight, and the filesystem was damaged enough that fsck
had to be run by hand.  (I have soft-updates enabled).  At this point I
figured that I'd been unfortunate enough to grab a bad snapshot of the
code, and went to update my kernel.  A cvsup of the repository succeeded,
but then my cvs update for the RELENG_4 branch caused another panic
partway through.  Needless to say, this left the filesystem in a less than
happy state.

Having been burned more than I was prepared to handle, I decided to pop my
trusty old 4.3-release CD in and do an upgrade overtop of the existing
installation.  Partway through the upgrade, I got another panic.

While I'm not sure about all of them, the most recent panics have all been
in the filesystem code.

The second machine started to go haywire about a day later.  I was working
in X at the time, and the entire system froze.  Being unable to find any
way to do a clean reboot, I was forced to reset the machine.  When it came
up again, it was unstable.  It will run for a while, and then after a
number of processes have been executed, things will start to randomly core
dump.  The machine does not appear to panic as often, though.  When it
dies, it gives errors like "page fault while running in supervisor mode".

It should be mentioned that I have added new ram to each of these machines
within the last month.  Thinking about it now, it seems to me that the
problems on the second machine could be attributed to this.  It could be
that it runs fine for a while, and then when the memory starts to fill up,
it goes bad.  I have just taken the extra chip out of that machine, and am
going to try another installworld.

I could be wrong, but I don't feel like the problems on the first machine
are related to the memory.  It seems almost like something has been
corrupted in the filesystem.  If this is the case, is there any solution
other than formatting the drive?

Thanks in advance,
Alex.




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