How to diagnose system freezes?

[Attilio Rao]

On 8/1/12, Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com> wrote:
> One of my 9.1-BETA1 systems periodically freezes. If sound was playing,
> it would usually cycle with a very short period. And system stops being
> sensitive to keyboard/mouse. Also ping of this system doesn't get a
> response.
> I would normally think that this is the faulty memory. But memory was
> recently replaced and tested with memtest+ for hours both before and
> after freezes and it passes all tests.
> One out of the ordinary thing that is running on this system is nvidia
> driver. But the freezes happen even when there is no graphics activity.
> Another out of the ordinary thing is that the kernel is built for
> DTrace. But DTrace was never used in the sessions that had a freeze.
>
> What is the way to diagnose this problem?

Start by adding SW_WATCHDOG to your machine with a reasonably low timeout.
Also, can you use a serial console? If yes you may consider going with
a serial break.

Attilio


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