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Date:      Mon, 12 Apr 1999 10:49:32 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
To:        Jack Freelander <jack@rabbit.eng.miami.edu>
Cc:        Jef <jam@winona.cs.miami.edu>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 3.0 -> 3.1
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.03.9904121044430.3957-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9904091853290.2346-100000@rabbit.eng.miami.edu>

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On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Jack Freelander wrote:

> > > FreeBSD 3.0-Release has the tendency to reboot itself, as I mentioned
> > > before.  Others have the same problem.  has this been fixed in 3.1?  
> > 
> > Can you be more specific?
> > 
> > I'm not aware of any spontaneous reboots in 3.x releases.
> 
> How can I explain spontaneous reboots?  They just happen, and FreeBSD
> leaves no record of why.  I wrote to questions@FreeBSD.org some time ago,
> and several other people replied that they were having the same problem.  
> I recently found out that hurricane.cs.miami.edu, another FreeBSD machine,
> is having a similar problem.  What gives?

Bad memory?  Unfortunately no one can do anything about it until we get a
crash dump or something that illustrates the faulty code path(s).  It's
about impossible to fix unreliably-reproducible faults.

It could be bad memory in parity-check systems, for all we know; their
reboots may be correct and intended behavior.

> Not to be rude, but the upgrade utility sucks.  It shouldn't allow you to
> even attempt an upgrade when it knows (and now so do I) that running
> /stand/sysinstall off the hard disk, even in single user mode, causes a
> ton of problems.

You should upgrade from the *new* boot floppy; it knows how to deal with
new upgrade-isms (except 3.1; the upgrade procedure there doesn't work).

> Please let me know what kinds of bug fixes were made in going from 3.0
> to 3.1.

There's a few thousand; you can start browsing at
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/.

> How, if at all, can I find out why FreeBSD decides to reboot itself (in
> case the problem doesn't go away)?

Try building a debug kernel (config -g) with 'options DDB', and hopefully
instead of rebooting it'll drop to the debugger.  I suggest the Handbook
section on kernel debugging for more information.

Doug White                               
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | www.freebsd.org



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