Dell - kernel panic problems

[Andrew Boring]

On Nov 21, 2006, at 6:11 PM, andrew at inemy.com wrote:

> I have problems with what appears to be kernel panics when accessing  
> the
> disk (either reading or writing). This box does nothing at the moment  
> but
> wait for me to install and configure something, since it's a test box  
> and
> hasn't even made it to live testing yet.
>
> The panics usually happen when installing something via Ports. Today,  
> as I
> was running a "make clean", I managed to get this one:
>
> Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
> fault virtual address = 0x20000
> fault code            = supervisor read, page not present
> instruction pointer   = 0x20:0xc083f0dc


Well, I'm disappointed that no one even responded with an RTFM  
somewhere that could I find more information on this. As it happens, a  
google search eventually pointed me back to this section of the FAQ:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/ 
advanced.html#KERNEL-PANIC-TROUBLESHOOTING

So here's the instruction pointer matching with the symbol table:

#nm -n /boot/kernel/kernel | grep c083f
c083f06c  T  pmap_clear_modify

It's possible that my instruction pointer in my first email above was  
typo'ed, since I handwrote the panic output and typed it into my email.

Any suggestions? I'm recompiling the GENERIC kernel with options DDB so  
I can capture the crash dump...but I would like to know if anyone has  
any suggestions in the meantime.

-Andrew