5 day lockup on Densitron

Christopher McGee chris at xecu.net
Wed May 11 08:19:50 PDT 2005


Richard J. Valenta wrote:

>First off - thank you for both your replies...
>
>The manufacturer (Densitron) has little info available, especially
>technological info.  I'm going to continue to look for this, but do
>either of you or anyone else have ideas on where to look for this?
>Would it be called a 'watchdog' in the BIOS?  
>
>Previous to this install there was a smaller hard disk and a Windows
>2000 install.  However, there was no regular reboot or anything else I
>knew of.  Of course, who knows if there's some kind of base Windows
>'stroker' that I'm unaware of, or if there was something in place that
>was part of the application it ran.
>
>Anyway - ideas on where to look, and subsequently disable, this (if its
>there)?
>
>Thanks again,
>
>Richard
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Clifton
>Royston
>Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:39 AM
>To: RW
>Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: Re: 5 day lockup on Densitron
>
>On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 04:30:15AM +0100, RW wrote:
>  
>
>>On Saturday 07 May 2005 02:00, Clifton Royston wrote:
>>    
>>
>>> What you describe
>>>could conceivably be the result of a special counter or RTC chip
>>>running as a "watchdog timer" with a count-down from boot time, and
>>>generating some kind of special interrupt when that countdown
>>>      
>>>
>reaches
>  
>
>>>0.  Watchdog devices are sometimes set up to require the application
>>>software to "stroke" the timer periodically (reset it in software)
>>>      
>>>
>with
>  
>
>>>the intent to force a reset of the system (usually a reboot) after
>>>such-and-such a period of time if not stroked.  
>>>      
>>>
>>Watchdog timeouts are typically a fraction of a minute, a 5 day
>>    
>>
>watchdog 
>  
>
>>timeout is very unlikely.
>>    
>>
>
>  Watchdogs are normally designed to be initialized at boot by the
>software, and as FreeBSD doesn't know about it...
>
>  It's a long-shot, but less so than "overheating" always happening to
>build up and cause a reset randomly at exactly the same 5 day period of
>time as somebody suggested.
>
>  -- Clifton
>
>  
>
I actually saw this same thing on 2 machines recently.  I suggest either 
upgrading to 5.4(not sure if it will fix it), or reverting to 4.11.  My 
company has not been able to justify putting any 5.3 boxes into 
production because they seem very unstable.  In our case the lockups 
were random.  Initially it was thought to be almost exactly every 2 days 
but later determined the lockups were random.  I installed 4.11 on both 
of those machines and they have been up every since.

Chris



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