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Date:      Tue, 29 Nov 2005 23:50:06 -0600
From:      Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen@math.missouri.edu>
To:        Dan Charrois <dan@syz.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?
Message-ID:  <438D3D8E.3010609@math.missouri.edu>
In-Reply-To: <6740EFFC-3303-4030-A175-2348A7067F9A@syz.com>
References:  <20051129204524.C626D16A41F@hub.freebsd.org> <6740EFFC-3303-4030-A175-2348A7067F9A@syz.com>

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Dan Charrois wrote:

> It actually may be a comfort, since perhaps HTT is related to the  
> culprit.  Since the last crash, about a month ago, I disabled HTT,  both 
> in the kernel as well in the BIOS.  So as far as I know, it's  
> completely been disabled (and the boot messages and top only show 2  
> CPUs).  And I haven't had the system go down for nearly a month now.

I don't know if it is related, but I used to have random reboots on a 
dual Xeon system with HTT enabled.  It happened when I ran a CPU 
intensive threaded program at the same time as "top" - running "top -s0" 
(which you have to do as root) could usually kill the machine in seconds 
if not minutes.

All I can tell you is that with FreeBSD 6.0 the problem disappeared.

Well not totally - I still get a bunch of harmless calcru negative 
messages, although I don't know if it is actually related to the boot 
problems I used to have with FreeBSD 5.4, because I get the calcru 
backwards messages even with HTT disabled.

Anyway, if you are in the mood to try it out, you might like to try 
re-enabling HTT, starting up whatever process you usually use (I'm 
guessing it is MySQL), and then run "top -s0".  If you get a crash soon 
after that, you have the same problem I had.

Let me also add that these crashes usually did not trigger a crash dump 
(I had dumpon set), and when it did the resulting dump looked rather 
corrupted.

Stephen



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