FreeBSD unstable on Dell 1750 using SMP?

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Dan Charrois wrote:

> It actually may be a comfort, since perhaps HTT is related to the  
> culprit.  Since the last crash, about a month ago, I disabled HTT,  both 
> in the kernel as well in the BIOS.  So as far as I know, it's  
> completely been disabled (and the boot messages and top only show 2  
> CPUs).  And I haven't had the system go down for nearly a month now.

I don't know if it is related, but I used to have random reboots on a 
dual Xeon system with HTT enabled.  It happened when I ran a CPU 
intensive threaded program at the same time as "top" - running "top -s0" 
(which you have to do as root) could usually kill the machine in seconds 
if not minutes.

All I can tell you is that with FreeBSD 6.0 the problem disappeared.

Well not totally - I still get a bunch of harmless calcru negative 
messages, although I don't know if it is actually related to the boot 
problems I used to have with FreeBSD 5.4, because I get the calcru 
backwards messages even with HTT disabled.

Anyway, if you are in the mood to try it out, you might like to try 
re-enabling HTT, starting up whatever process you usually use (I'm 
guessing it is MySQL), and then run "top -s0".  If you get a crash soon 
after that, you have the same problem I had.

Let me also add that these crashes usually did not trigger a crash dump 
(I had dumpon set), and when it did the resulting dump looked rather 
corrupted.

Stephen