Weird crashes

Allan Fields bsd at afields.ca
Tue Aug 17 13:41:06 PDT 2004


On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 06:43:14PM +0000, Baldur Gislason wrote:
> I have a computer running FreeBSD 5.2.1-REL, I've tried 3 different video 
> cards (two nvidia and one matrox), I've tried two different motherboards 
> (Aopen AK77-8XN and Aopen AK77-600GN), I've tried using just a single memory 
> DIMM out of the two, I've tried two different processors (AMD AthlonXP 2500+ 
> 1.83GHz and AMD Duron 1300MHz).

If you've moved the processors, did you redo thermal interface?

Even stock AMD Athlon heatsinks w/ thermal pad can be problematic,
even at normal room temperatures, I would suggest if your a bit
uncertain, clean the pads off the heatsinks and CPU mating surface
and try reapplying thermal interface grease such as Arctic Silver
3 or 5.

> I also tried moving the swap partition on a different hard drive.
> 
> The problem is this:
> Programs crash, namely Xfree86.
> Xfree86 always stops on signal 6 (SIGABRT), and it seems to happen mostly when 
> I've filled the RAM and have started to use quite a bit of swap. I'm mostly 
> filling the ram with lots of browser windows opening heavy graphics off the 
> network.

Do you get any panics, or just processes die?  If no panics or
lockups, it might not be a hardware issue.

Have you looked into resource limits?

> Any debugging ideas?

Do you see any messages on the console?  You could always take the
debugging route explained in the handbook and employ a serial
console.

> brgds.
> Baldur Gislason

-- 
 Allan Fields, AFRSL - http://afields.ca
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