Kernel panic on PowerEdge 1950 under certain stress load

[Ivan Voras]

On 24/09/2007, Benjie Chen <benjie at addgene.org> wrote:
> Ivan and Kris,
>
> I will try to get a kernel trace -- it may not happen for awhile since I am
> not in the office and working remotely for awhile so it may not be easy to
> get a trace... but I will check.

It's fairly easy:

1) add lines like the following in rc.conf:
dumpdev="/dev/amrd0s1b"
dumpdir="/storage1/crashdumps"

(dumpdev is your swap partition, which must be larger than your RAM,
dumpdir is where the crash dumps will be saved, also needs to be
larger than RAM)

2) add these lines to sysctl.conf:

debug.debugger_on_panic=0
debug.trace_on_panic=1

(These will cause the panic message and backtrace to be automatically
recorded in the message buffer saved to the kernel crash dump. If not
told otherwise, the machine will then reboot and at the next boot
generate a crash dump in your dumpdir. When you get the kernel crash
dump, run "kgdb vmcore.0 /boot/kernel/kernel" as root and then you can
inspect the trace, core dump, etc. You don't need any special
knowledge of (k)gdb for this. The one useful command to you may be
"bt" - generate a backtrace).

> It looks like the problem reported by that link, and some of the links from
> there though...

I'm trying to solve that one with Craig Rodrigues. So far it's been
without success but we know where the problem is.