Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2005 03:58:21 -0700 From: Dan Charrois <dan@syz.com> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP? Message-ID: <A64C1C7E-C8F3-4C67-8211-3CD9B51DB06F@syz.com> In-Reply-To: <20051125033033.D779D16A42D@hub.freebsd.org> References: <20051125033033.D779D16A42D@hub.freebsd.org>
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Thanks everyone for replies made over the past few days about the "unsolicited" rebooting problem. At first, I thought there was a memory allocation bug as judged by the output of "netstat -m", but apparently it's just a cosmetic statistics reporting bug and nothing related to the instability itself. Unfortunately, it means that I still haven't been able to find a solution to the problem (and apparently, I'm not the only one to experience it). Considering that we only have the one machine, which happens to be a production machine, that experiences the problem (infrequently at that), it's difficult to test and resolve. It's been suggested that FreeBSD 6.0 may fix the problem, but considering some of the inevitable bugs that creep into new releases, I'm reluctant to go there until things settle down in 6.0 (plus, I haven't seen any documentation that implies that a fix for the problem will result from using 6.0 in any case). If it weren't a production machine that needs to be reliable, stable, and available, I'd have a better chance at being able to test it under 6.0. Some speculation has been made about it being triggered by possibly buggy ethernet drivers, etc. In my case, though possible, I doubt it - since my machine has rebooted itself right when mysqlhotcopy was about to run on the machine (and it runs locally without causing any network activity that I'm aware of). The first thought I had was that it may be caused by faulty memory or something, but Dell's hardware diagnostics all tested everything to be perfectly okay. What I find strange is that it's not that the kernel locks up or anything - the machine just suddenly restarts (caches aren't flushed to disk or anything - it's just like someone literally pulls the power plug midstream, and then plugs it back in. The only indication that something weird goes on is that in the server logs everything seems to be crunching away happily and then suddenly I see the boot messages when it restarts all by itself.. In any case, if anyone else with a dual processor machine (I have a PowerEdge 2850 myself) has experienced the rebooting problem discussed a few days ago and resolved it, I'd very much like to hear from you. Dan -- Syzygy Research & Technology Box 83, Legal, AB T0G 1L0 Canada Phone: 780-961-2213
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