periodic freeze and reset

[Bill Moran]

Ghirai <ghirai at ghirai.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2007 16:31:41 -0400
> Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> 
> > Ghirai <ghirai at ghirai.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hello list,
> > > 
> > > My desktop running 6.2-STABLE is freezing then resetting shortly after.
> > > This behaviour happens every couple hours, for no apparent reason.
> > > 
> > > I checked messages, etc, there's nothing there.
> > > 
> > > This is getting annoying... :/
> > > 
> > > I'd appreciate any hints/where to look/what to look for.
> > 
> > My first guess would be hardware problems.  Have you run memtest?
> > Checked for cooling problems?  cpuburn to test for a flaky CPU?
> > 
> 
> Haven't ran any hw monitors/test, but i spend time periodically in windows,
> about 2-3 days each time, and it didn't crash reset.
> 
> That's why i think there are no hw issues.
> 
> In FreeBSD the freeze+resets occur and seemingly random intervals, but
> not longer than 30 hours. Mostly within 6 hours.

That seems to suggest that it isn't hardware, but doesn't completely
eliminate the possibility.

Often, vendors write drivers to work around known deficiencies in their
hardware.  Since FreeBSD's drivers are written to the specs, they may
expose these deficiencies while the vendor's drivers intentionally avoid
them.

Additionally, FreeBSD seems to work hardware in different ways than
Windows, thus tickling corner cases with hardware that's just barely
failing.  Run some hardware tests to be sure.

Also, the driver issue that was raised is a good point.  I've seen a
number of buggy NICs where the vendor's driver worked around the
bugginess so it _looked_ like FreeBSD was at fault.

Make sure all your hardware is known to work on FreeBSD.

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com