How to troubleshoot solid freeze-up?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Sun, Oct 02, 2005 at 03:59:50PM -0400, David S. Madole wrote:
> I'm looking for some tips on how to troubleshoot a possible driver 
> problem. Here is the scenario:
> 
> 1. Using a Pentium II 333Mhz mobile processor, 82443BX motherboard, and 
> Intel i82559 NIC (fxp driver).
> 
> 2. A combination of heavy disk I/O, high CPU utilization, and high 
> network traffic causes a solid machine freeze-up sometime between 10 
> minutes and 3 hours of running.
> 
> 3. Replacing the NIC with a DP83815-based card (sis driver) seems to 
> solve the problem. I have run the problem load for up to 8 hours without 
> issue on this NIC.
> 
> 4. The problem is reproducable on multiple identical machines with 
> multiple identical NICs. Also reproducable on an i82558 NIC integrated on 
> the motherboard.
> 
> How can I go about collecting useful information to troubleshoot this 
> when the machine locks solid? How can a get a core under this scenario?
> 
> Switching to another NIC permanently is not a great solution because this 
> is a semi-embedded application and I need to use the NIC on the 
> motherboard.

You can't break to DDB in the usual way, right (Ctrl+alt+esc)?  Try
turning on KDB_STOP_NMI instead.  Also try turning on WITNESS in case
you're seeing a lock order reversal.  Actually you forgot to mention
what version of FreeBSD you're running, those suggestions only apply
to 5.x and above.

Kris
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