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Date:      Sun, 21 Jan 2001 02:32:38 -0800
From:      Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com>
To:        current@freebsd.org
Subject:   HEADS UP: Strange booting lockups
Message-ID:  <20010121023238.S69199@canonware.com>

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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


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