Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 14:24:51 -0600 (CST) From: Jonathan Fosburgh <wotan@Dorm-35861.RH.UH.EDU> To: Steve Grandi <grandi@noao.edu> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: I need a strategy for making my STABLE installation stable Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980216141957.29397A-100000@Dorm-35861.RH.UH.EDU> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980216115540.9052A-100000@mirfak.tuc.noao.edu>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > My STABLE system hasn't been very stable: I've been averaging one system > crash a day for the past week or so. The frequency of crashes is > increasing with perhaps one crash a week averaged the past 3 months. I > need some help in devising a stratey to make things stable... > > The hardware: PentiumPro-200 (Venus MotherBoard), 128 MB of RAM, Adaptec > 2940 Ultra-Wide SCSI controller, two Seagate ST32155W 2GB disks, a > Micropolis 3391WS 9GB disk, Plextor SCSI CD-ROM, Intel EtherExpress Pro > 10/100B Ethernet card. > > The System: FreeBSD 2.2.5-STABLE kept up-to-date via CVSUP > > What's the system doing: DNS server, Semdmail server, FTP server, Net News > server. > > Ever since I upgraded to 2.2.5-RELEASE in late November, I've seen far too > many system crashes. About half the time, the crash would be followed by > a reboot. The other half of the time the system would just hang with no > response from the console keyboard or active rlogin sessions (but > sometimes the system would still answer PINGs). Crashes seemed to follow > heavy disk I/O and/or paging (usually soon after an INN expire with a > 200MB+ history file). > > Despite nearly 15 years experience with BSD (going back to 4.1BSD on VAX > 11/750s), I am sometimes not a very bright lad and it took me a LONG > time to realize that system panics are not noted in any system logs > after a reboot. I finally wised up and started playing some games. > > I compiled DDB into the kernel and had several crashes that caused a drop > into the debugger with the result: > > Fatal Trap 12 page fault while in kernel mode > ... > supervisor read, page not present > ... > current process = 4 (update) > ... > > I still haven't managed to capture a core file so I won't attempt to type > in the traceback. I think I have dumpon configured properly through the > dumpdev variable in /etc/rc.conf; but today's perusal of the man pages > seems to indicate that savecore won't save a crash dump if /kernel isn't > the same as the kernel running at the time of the crash. So I need to > stop tweaking things. > > So what strategy should I follow to make the system stable and make the Users > happy again? Thoughts that I have had: > > 1) Capture a crash dump and see where that leads me. > > 2) Start swapping hardware (I have some new memory --- Parity memory > this time! -- on order and I do have a spare Adapatec board I can lay > my hands on). > > 3) Keep tweaking the kernel config file. So far, I have increased > values for MAXDSIZ, DFLDSIZ and NMBCLUSTERS and deleted the options MFS > and AHC_ALLOW_MEMIO. The next item on my hit list would be deleting > AHC_TAGENABLE. > > Any advice out there? I was having this problem with 2.2.5-R (as did a few other people who cropped up on this list from time to time) and my solution (since I haven't the diskspace to use CVS) was to upgrade using the snapshots on releng22.freebsd.org. Snapshots after about mid-December have been quite stable for me overall, without suffering a crash sincevery early in January (after moving the machine a few hundred miles .. so maybe that could have caused problems) and I have currently been having no problems abd the machine has been up ~14 days since my last reboot. My advice is to get a snapshot from early January (my last upgrade) and see what happens. This is done from the upgrade option under /stand/sysinstall. I am using 2.2-980101-SNAP right now. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQBVAwUBNOigmPx1aCmcyaTdAQHGPwH8DfZMbe02u5iH7ew5Qeer9Qbud93YHbig S6ZUXV95lKEaPAVjzNiBggxg1R0vZYg2jJVGDn7MEW7nQ3iYHFE3tQ== =CKON -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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