Help to find cause of recurring crash

[fbsd]

Pietro Cerutti wrote:
> On 5/16/06, fbsd <fbsd at aanet.com.au> wrote:
>> Hello All,
>>
>> I'm  running a home email server and twice in the last week it has
>> rebooted itself and been unable to restart due to corruption of the
>> filesystem. I found the following in /var/log/messages
>>
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra syslogd: kernel boot file is 
>> /boot/kernel/kernel
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel:
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel:
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: Fatal trap 12: page fault while in
>> kernel mode
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: fault virtual address    = 0x1c
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: fault code        = supervisor write,
>> page not present
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: instruction pointer    = 
>> 0x20:0xc062c5e8
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: stack pointer            = 
>> 0x28:0xe5079c50
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: frame pointer            = 
>> 0x28:0xe5079c64
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: code segment        = base 0x0, limit
>> 0xfffff, type 0x1b
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: processor eflags    = interrupt
>> enabled, resume, IOPL = 0
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: current process        = 52 (vnlru)
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: trap number        = 12
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: panic: page fault
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: Uptime: 5d7h4m50s
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: Dumping 1023 MB (2 chunks)
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: chunk 0: 1MB (159 pages) ... ok
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: chunk 1: 1023MB (261872 pages) 1007 991
>> 975 959 943 927 911 895 879 863 847 831 815 799 783 767 751 735 719 703
>> 687 671 655 639 623 607 591 575 559 543 527 511 495 479 463 447 431 415
>> 399 383 367 351 335 319 303 287 271 255 239 223 207 191 175 159 143 127
>> 111 95 79 63 47 31 15 ... ok
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel:
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: Dump complete
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - press
>> a key on the console to abort
>> May 16 17:46:07 hpvectra kernel: Rebooting...
>
> The only thing I can see (read: understand) is:
> the process that caused the kernel panic is "vnlru":
>
> "vnlru flushes and frees vnodes when the system hits the
> kern.maxvnodes limit. This kernel thread sits mostly idle, and only
> activates if you have a huge amount of RAM and are accessing tens of
> thousands of tiny files."
>
> (from http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/10.31.shtml)
>
> So, consider increasing kern.maxvnodes if your system deals with such
> a huge amount of files.
>
>>
>
>> Thanks in advance,
>
> Hope this helps,
>
>>
>> Ron
>
>
Thanks Pietro,

I will do that. However I don't think 1GB of RAM is so big and as a home 
server I would be lucky to deal with more than a couple of hundred 
emails per day. So if anyone can shed any more light it will be 
appreaciated.

Thanks

Ron