4.11 panic every 23 hours 55 minutes or so

Doug Lee dgl at dlee.org
Sun May 17 13:14:05 UTC 2009


On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 07:39:46AM -0400, Glen Barber wrote:
> On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 7:06 AM, Doug Lee <dgl at dlee.org> wrote:
> > One of the weirder things I've seen in a while here...
> >
> > OS: FreeBSD 4.11 (yeah I know, old, but generally stable)
> > CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz
> > real memory ?= 536608768 (524032K bytes)
> > Hds: IDE
> >

> Do you by chance have the kernel built with debugging enabled?

Afraid not, nor much space in / for that.  I partitioned this system
before /modules arrived, and I barely have enough space in / now
(about 3 meg free).  That shouldn't affect this issue though; I do
have separate /usr, /var, and /tmp.  I do mount /tmp and /var/run via
MFS.

> > Problem: ?Ever since a suspitious power outage (I say suspitious
> > because we think a surge was also involved), this box has been
> > exhibiting kernel panics about every 23 hours 55 minutes, give or
> > take about 4 minutes either way. ?Obviously hardware is suspect,
> > and hopefully in line for upgrade; but as FreeBSD has always proven
> > so stable for me, I'm curious what on earth could cause this sort
> > of regular panic?
> >
> > It's not time of day; if I reboot at 2:00 AM, 3:55 PM, or any other
> > time, it's 23:55 or so later I get a panic, whenever that may be.
> > I think this rules out cron jobs, external attacks, and load-based
> > issues.
> >

> Perhaps a bad CMOS battery causing the system time to become
> corrupted?  (I know it's a long shot...)

Interesting idea, though I'd be surprised since I think the system
time is set via ntpd, is it not?  `date' seems to recover nicely every
time anyway.  A power surge could indeed play with CMOS though... but
how would I test for this while the system is running?

-- 
Doug Lee                 dgl at dlee.org                http://www.dlee.org
SSB BART Group           doug.lee at ssbbartgroup.com   http://www.ssbbartgroup.com
"Pray devoutly, but hammer stoutly."
--Sir William G. Benham


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list