FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?

[Rutger Bevaart]

On Nov 25, 2005, at 8:09 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:
>
> As I said twice already, the stats leak is ***HARMLESS***.  It only
> gives the wrong value to counters that are unused for anything except
> reporting to the user.
>

Aha, that's what I was trying to clear up when the whole counters  
issue came
along in the first place. Must have missed your previous remark about  
it.

>> No way we'll be upgrading to 6.0 without knowing exactly what
>> is going on (remembering broken 4.10 -> 5.3 systems) ...
>
> 5.4 -> 6.0 is really a very minor jump.  But if you're not willing to
> even test it out on one machine to see whether it resolves your
> problems, you'll likely just have to get used to the instability until
> someone can identify your problem and then fix it.
>

Of course I'm trying it out, it's just hard to get a spare Dell 2850  
and put
it through the same day-to-day use as the rest of them. That's a matter
of cost.

On other posts I've basically offered anything short of root access to
resolve this. There are actually quite a group of people with issues
with this. Some think it's an ACPI issue. An irq conflict with USB  
has been
suggested. the 'em' driver was suspect, the 'bge' driver was suspect,  
the
'amr' driver was suspect.

Funny thing is we have this 1750 (2x 2.4 Xeon) that takes a major  
hitting each
day, running 5.3-BETA6. Hasn't crashed ever.

If you have any clues on where I can look further (previous posts at:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-smp/2005-July/000930.html)
greatly appreciated.

Regards & thanks for all the help,
Rutger