From owner-freebsd-current Tue Oct 24 19:54:26 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from jaunt.chuckr.org (jaunt.chuckr.org [216.254.96.119]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 43DA337B479; Tue, 24 Oct 2000 19:54:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (chuckr@localhost) by jaunt.chuckr.org (8.9.3+Sun/8.9.3) with ESMTP id WAA06589; Tue, 24 Oct 2000 22:54:34 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 22:54:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey To: John Baldwin Cc: FreeBSD-current@FreeBSD.org Subject: RE: smp instability In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, John Baldwin wrote: > > On 25-Oct-00 Chuck Robey wrote: > > I'm having rather extreme problems with stability on my dual PIII > > setup. I know this is to be expected, but it's gotten so extreme on my > > system, I can't spend more than a few minutes before it locks up. > > > > Is there any chance that I could make things better by using a sysctl to > > tell the box it's now a single-cpu system? I can't read man pages at the > > moment (I'm composing this on my Sparc Ultra-5) so if this might work, and > > someone knows the exact command to use, I'd appreciate a bit of help. > > You can use kernel.old to compile a UP kernel. I always keep a UP kernel > around just in case. Also, when did your SMP box become unstable? There > was a known problem with SMP boxes when the vm page zero'ing during the idle > loop was first turned on that has since been fixed with the latest commit to > vm_machdep.c yesterday. Symptoms were frequent kernel panic 12's with > interrupts disabled . No kernel panics, just lockups. I saw the startup problems (having to hit a lot of control-C's to get booted) and I had two kinds of lockup problems, one a complete machine freeze (still pings, but that's all) and also a strange one where an entire mounted filesystem would disappear. I can back up to my kernel.gd I keep around, but I have to get me an older mountd, netstat, ps (and others) before that older kernel is good, and it was from before the /boot/kernel thing (I hated that idea, and still do). I'm going to try the sysctl route first, see if that works. I won't be able to report reliable results until the morning (if it lasts all night, it's a huge fix). As it stands now, no way can I do any compiling. > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message