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Date:      Mon, 30 Oct 1995 01:38:38 +1100 (EST)
From:      michael butler <imb@scgt.oz.au>
To:        hsu@cs.hut.fi (Heikki Suonsivu)
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: load related problem or my compilation ?
Message-ID:  <199510291438.BAA09021@asstdc.scgt.oz.au>
In-Reply-To: <199510291407.QAA09219@shadows.cs.hut.fi> from "Heikki Suonsivu" at Oct 29, 95 04:07:52 pm

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> Make sure external cache is write through.

The machine is sufficiently old so as not to have this optional .. i.e. I
assume it can only be write-through.
 
> We are seeing similar effects on -STABLE, but also get panics (dumps
> available as ftp://clinet.fi/pub/FreeBSD/crashdumps/*.[2-8].  Maybe ppp is
> releasing a mbuf which has already been freed (the contents are 0xdeadc0de
> and such)?  The lockups vary, either it just locks up, or it panics but
> does not get far enough after dumping to reset.  Probably all this is
> because of wild pointers generated by access to freed data? 

I recompiled with "-O -pipe -m486". Now, with only two 28k8 modems being fed
as fast as a Cisco with stacker compression enabled will allow (~3000cps
each), it will now mostly just spontaneously reboot. One modem alone won't
do it .. two running flat out will inside half an hour :-( Both modem links
are running with an MTU/MRU of 552, so there is some (hopefully small)
amount of fragmentation going on.

Watching the mbuf clusters, I see no more than ~120k allocated in ~40-50
clusters so there doesn't seem to be any shortage .. I did another compile
with NMBCLUSTERS=2048 but, as expected, nothing different happened. It still
dies without logging anything at all about the failure event.

I have a feeling (more than actual observation as the machine's 4km from
here) that it may be dying when one of the modems drops the link whilst in
full flight .. ~16k of data in the PPP send queue with more rapidly arriving
.. but I haven't been able to catch it doing it whilst I'm actually there
and watching it.

Another possibility is that this one is a relatively slow machine with only
16 meg of RAM, so it's also vaguely possible that it's finding a kernel
memory allocation problem that doesn't worry faster ones.

> I'm trying going back to -current, as I did not have this problem before
> (but we didn't get this much PPP dialin load before).

Mine is -current as of ~7am, Oct 15th .. a week or so after the VM stuff got
fixed .. has anyone changed anything else since then that might affect/fix
this ?

	michael



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