From owner-freebsd-current Sun Jan 21 2:33: 3 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from magnesium.net (toxic.magnesium.net [207.154.84.15]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 2654337B400 for ; Sun, 21 Jan 2001 02:32:46 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 50424 invoked by uid 1142); 21 Jan 2001 10:32:45 -0000 Date: 21 Jan 2001 02:32:45 -0800 Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 02:32:38 -0800 From: Jason Evans To: current@freebsd.org Subject: HEADS UP: Strange booting lockups Message-ID: <20010121023238.S69199@canonware.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Several of us have started experiencing problems with kernels that won't boot. The symptom is hard to miss: the machine locks up at the spinner just before printing the copyright message at the beginning of the boot sequence. We don't know why this is happening, and at this point the primary suspicion is that this problem has been lurking for quite some time, and we've recently committed a combination of changes that causes the problem to exhibit itself more consistently. Jake Burkholder, Peter Wemm, and I all checked in changes that were independently tested and confirmed to work, yet the combination of the changes seems to be bad, even though none of them appear to touch code that is executed so early during boot. There is a report (that just came to my attention) of this problem existing for one person at least two weeks ago, so it isn't clear yet what conditions cause the problem to manifest itself. A number of us are searching for the problem, but it may take some time. Meanwhile, it may be a good idea to hold off committing changes to core parts of the kernel until we are able to analyze this problem. Naturally, if someone knows what is wrong, we would love to hear about it. Jason To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message