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To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@ki.net>
cc: current@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Intelligent Debugging Tools... 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 23 Apr 1996 16:02:04 EDT."
             <Pine.NEB.3.93.960423154553.23204B-100000@freebsd.ki.net> 
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Date: Tue, 23 Apr 1996 14:43:25 -0700
From: "Amancio Hasty Jr." <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
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Hi,

It will help if you post your hardware configuration. A few months
ago there was a nasty PCI interaction in the kernel which caused
my system to crash so glad that whatever it was is gone 8)

	Cheers,
	Amancio

>>> "Marc G. Fournier" said:
 > 
 > Hi...
 > 
 > 	What would it take to either create software for debugging
 > hardware, and/or add appropriate debugging to the kernel that would
 > improve debugging of hardware problems?
 > 
 > 	Erk...as far as software is concerned, maybe something that
 > you could run in single user mode that would completely thrash the
 > RAM, doing read/writes to *all* the memory looking for any corruption?
 > Or something else that could be turned on against /dev/rsd0b to totally
 > thrash the swap space on a drive?
 > 
 > 	As far as the kernel is concerned, I'm getting panics in VM
 > and keep getting told its hardware problems...fine, but there *has*
 > to be a better way of isolating the problem then replacing bits and
 > pieces until the problem seems to go away.  For instance, when I get
 > a VM fault...what exactly *is* the problem?  Is it a problem with 
 > the swap space (ie. hard drives) or RAM?
 > 
 > 	My -stable machine is a 4 month old computer, and all the 
 > parts are new in her...last I've been asked is "when am I going to
 > replace the machine"...replace it with what?  its all new...if there
 > was some way of narrowing down the offending parts and replacing 
 > those, that would be great...but just going out and buying a new machine
 > is not the answer, cause the part that is wrong with *this* machine 
 > might exist in the next machine *shrug*
 > 
 > 	Does this make any sense?
 > 
 > Marc G. Fournier                                  scrappy@ki.net
 > Systems Administrator @ ki.net               scrappy@freebsd.org
 > 
 >