6.4-RC2 crashes after a few minutes of uptime

Rory Arms rorya+freebsd.org at TrueStep.com
Thu Nov 6 21:16:19 PST 2008


Ken,

First of all, I'm not subscribed to the freebsd-stable@ mailing list,  
so please include me in any replies. I have been using a Dell Pentium  
II Inspiron 3700 (192 MiB of RAM, 430 Mhz PII-Celeron CPU) to test  
FreeBSD 6.4 and have been noticing panics since upgrading it to 6.4-RC1.

The system initially was installed with 6.3-RELEASE (single partition  
installation, ACPI enabled, GNOME 2) and had been quite stable. So, in  
an effort to help test 6.4, I upgraded it to 6.4-RC1 using freebsd- 
update(8). The upgrade has destabilized the system, as every single  
bootup since then has led to a panic. I had coredumps turned on, so I  
tried to gather a backtrace with kgdb(1) and every time I'd try it  
would hang trying to parse the core dump. All I see is 4 lines of  
"Attempt to extract a compoent of a value that is not a structure  
pointer." and it hangs.

So, today I decided to upgrade to 6.4-RC2 in hopes that it would  
resolve these problems and it also crashes. Though it does seem to  
last longer before panicing. With RC1 I couldn't even get a full login  
to GNOME to finish before the panic, most times. Now, with RC2 it  
seems to crash later, but this could just be coincidence. So far I've  
just had one crash with RC2, and am now running a few apps in GNOME to  
see if I can trigger it again.

Note also, with RC2 I'm unable to analyze the kernel core dump either.  
kgdb(1) seems to hang with the same error as with RC1. I do have  
minidump on with RC2, and I've just now disabled it so that next time  
it crashes, it will save a full core file, to see if that makes a  
difference. Though, if RC1 is any indication, I doubt that will make  
any difference, but we'll see. All I can glean from the panic (from  
the info.0 file) is that the Panic String is a "page fault." I believe  
this was the same error with RC1 and as I recall every panic I was  
able to see (at the console) it involved the process named "swi6."  
Guess I should try booting with ACPI disabled to see if there is any  
difference, though I never had to do this with 6.3.

Well, if I can assist with further debugging, let me know.

Thanks,

- rory


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