reboot after panic : page fault for two consecutive days now with FreeBSD stable 7.0

[Kris Kennaway]

eculp wrote:
> This is on a relatively new Dell dualcore with 4G of ram running up to 
> date stable.  I'm not on site so I have no idea what might be provoking 
> these crashes.  In fact in many years of running FreeBSD I've not seen 
> something just happen like this.  It is a simi-production machine that 
> cvsups daily and builds and installs a new world and kernel.  Ports are 
> updated about once a week and haven't seen any issues previously.  It 
> has been running 24/7 since new, about 8 months.
> 
> 3 files were generated info, bounds and vmcore.  The info file follows:
> 
> Dump header from device /dev/mfid0s1b
>   Architecture: i386
>   Architecture Version: 2
>   Dump Length: 341225472B (325 MB)
>   Blocksize: 512
>   Dumptime: Wed Jun 11 12:34:24 2008
>   Hostname: casasponti.net
>   Magic: FreeBSD Kernel Dump
>   Version String: FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE #258: Tue Jun 10 05:54:42 CDT 2008
>     root at casasponti.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/ENCONTACTO
>   Panic String: page fault
>   Dump Parity: 2395754794
>   Bounds: 2
>   Dump Status: good
> 
> the vmcore is about 300M so I'm not attaching it;) I could put it on 
> line at a moments notice.  I think that what I need is probably a crash 
> course on debugging a crash and I really don't know where to start since 
> after over 10 years with freebsd I've never needed it.  Any help, 
> suggestions, etc. would be greatly appreciated.

See the developers' handbook chapter on kernel debugging.

However, panics that "suddenly" start happening frequently on a system 
that has been stable for a while with no OS or workload changes made, 
are usually due to the hardware starting to fail.

Kris