From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jun 17 19:30:10 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from veenet.value.net (value.net [209.182.128.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 39B2015413 for ; Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:30:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from rfg@monkeys.com) Received: from monkeys.com (i180.value.net [206.14.136.180]) by veenet.value.net (8.8.7/8.7.4) with ESMTP id TAA23309; Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:33:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from monkeys.com (LOCALHOST [127.0.0.1]) by monkeys.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id TAA02532; Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:30:53 -0700 To: Dan Nelson Cc: Greg Lehey , Thomas David Rivers , mistwolf@ethereal.net, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: A suggested kernel enhancement relating to kernel panics. In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 17 Jun 1999 21:16:55 -0500. <19990617211655.A9746@dan.emsphone.com> From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 19:30:53 -0700 Message-ID: <2530.929673053@monkeys.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message <19990617211655.A9746@dan.emsphone.com>, you wrote: >In the last episode (Jun 18), Greg Lehey said: >> That's normal. When you panic, you stop writing to disk (except for >> the dump). > >Maybe he's not panicing then. I've had my BSD box do a spontaneous >reboot on me once or twice. This kind of crash is mighty hard to debug >though, since it doesn't leave anything to debug :) It is hard for me to know if _that_ (spontaneous reboot) is happening or not because (as I said earlier) I am _not_ configured to get panic dumps at present. The reason I am not so configured is that my physical memory is bigger than my swap partition. So it looks like I am SOL as far as getting a panic dump, even if the system _is_ panicing (which I am still not even sure of). A footnote: I made some modest changes to my heavy-load-inducing application program to prevent it from trying to initiate too many TCP connections during any given wall-clock second, and now everything appears to be running peachy again. I suspect that the earlier panics and/or spontaneous reboots I was seeing much have been due to _some_ very obscure kernel (or perhaps even CPU) bug that _only_ makes itself apparent under _very_ heavy interrupt loads. If short, when you push the envelope and go where no man has gone before, you are likely to find stuff that nobody has ever found before. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message