Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Mark Felder]

On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:31:38 -0500, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org>  
wrote:

> * have you filed a PR?

No

> * is the crash easily reproducable?

Unfortunately not. It's totally random. Some servers will "get the bug"  
and crash daily, some will crash weekly, some might seem to be fine but 3  
months later hit this crash.

> * are you able to boot some ramdisk-only FreeBSD-8.2 images (eg create
> a ramdisk image using nanobsd?) and do some stress testing inside
> that?

That's a plan I'd like to execute but my free time for building that  
environment is rather short at the moment :(

> I'm not that
> cluey on ESXi, but there may be some PIC/APIC/ACPI change between 7.x
> and 8.0 which has caused this to surface.

Was there a setting to revert ACPI behavior from 8.x to 7.x? I thought I  
read about that at one point.... or perhaps this was something available  
back in the dev cycle when 8 was -CURRENT. *shrug* I know 9.0 and onward  
has even more ACPI changes so assuming it truly is an ACPI bug I guess we  
could cross our fingers and hope that the bug has mysteriously vanished?