Xserve G5 keeps shutting down

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 06/20/11 15:22, Paul Mather wrote:
> I'm running FreeBSD/powerpc64 -CURRENT on an Xserve G5.  With a recent kernel, the system will not stay up for more than a few hours at a time. :-(
>
> I have no idea why the machine is shutting off.  There is no panic or crash dump and there is no indication in the logs of anything awry.  The system just powers down.  The times this has happened when I have been there have not indicated anything stressing the system (like all fans racing madly) and oftentimes the system has been relatively idle.  (Oddly, it never appears to my knowledge to have shut down when doing sometime potentially taxing, such as a make -j5 buildworld or the likes.)
>
> The main thing I have noticed since building this new kernel is that the fans are now controlled automatically, i.e., there is now no need for the tickle-the-fan-controller cron job of yore, meaning the fans won't race when in single user mode (e.g., during an installworld).

If the temperature on any sensor exceeds its maximum value, it will 
cause the machine to shut off. There was at one point a problem with 
some of the sensor drivers that would would report erroneous crazy 
values sometimes. Most of the known problems were fixed andreast a few 
weeks ago, but it looks like you ran into another. My work desktop has a 
ds1775 and a max6690, and has no problems, but not an ad7417, so I would 
guess the problem lies there. Could you try commenting out line 116 of 
/sys/powerpc/powermac/powermac_thermal.c? That will cause it to spam the 
console (and dmesg) about the error, identifying the sensor, but not 
shut off the machine and so both keep your server on and let us work out 
the problem.
-Nathan