FreeBSD 6.x CVSUP today crashes with zero load ...

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Mon, 26 Jun 2006, Robert Watson wrote:

>
> On Mon, 26 Jun 2006, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
>>> I'm also running 6.x on several dual-PIII without problems.  An issue 
>>> local to Marc's setup is definitely indicated.  Given the failure mode, I 
>>> would be worried about a potential hardware issue, although subtle 
>>> hardware and subtle system software problems are sometimes difficult to 
>>> distinguish.
>> 
>> Well, I've been trying to do it 'the hardway' ... went back to the original 
>> kernel, and am slowly upgrading forward ... I'm currently running a June 
>> 15th kernel with none of the problems that I was seeing before ... I'm just 
>> in the process of running my third 'make -j3 buildworld' on this kernel, 
>> and its clean ... going to go forward to June 22nd next, see if that too is 
>> clean *cross fingers*
>
> I think this is a useful activity, especially if you've already run extensive 
> memory testing on the box.  If you haven't yet done that, I encourage you to 
> take a break from buildworld's and make sure the memory tests pass. I spent 
> several months on and off trying to track down a bug a few years ago, which 
> turned out to be a one bit error in memory on the box.  It would appear and 
> disappear based on how the memory page was used -- for debugging kernels, it 
> consistently got mapped to padding in the kernel's bss.  For non-debugging 
> kernels, it typically manifested in other usable kernel momory.  Changes in 
> kernel versions would move the bit around kernel memory and user memory, 
> resulting in hard to debug failure modes.  I wish I'd run the memory test 
> earlier, but the lesson is clear!

Is there something that I can run *from* FreeBSD, remotely, to do this?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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