R: 6.4-RC2 crashes after a few minutes of uptime

barbara.xxx1975 at libero.it barbara.xxx1975 at libero.it
Fri Nov 7 00:10:26 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


Hello,
I had a similar problem 
described on this thread
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-
October/045865.html

Summarizing, I had several panics about swi6 (but I had 
them after some/several hours of uptime).
I'm tracking STABLE and generally I'm 
resyncing /usr/src every 1-2 weeks and I started having problems since about 
Oct. 5.
Unfortunately I had no answer.
The problem *seems* gone away after 
taking the following actions:
- disable powerd (I had enabled it few days 
before the problem emerged)
- getting new sources and doing a new buildworld
- 
rebuilding some gnome ports (the "non usual" ones I was using when panics 
occurred) and all the gnome deamons (sysutils/hal etc.) - as the guy having a 
similar problem on 7 "solved" moving away from gnome
I'm not sure about what 
has been the resolutive action (and even if I had no more panics, I'm not 
really sure that the problem could be considered solved!)

I hope that it could 
help about your stability problem...

regards
Barbara



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