amd64/128263: [panic] 2 amd64 dl380 g5 with dual quadcore xeons, 8 and 16gb ram, crash and dump mem

[Martin W]

The following reply was made to PR amd64/128263; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Martin W <mw at apathia.net>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org, martin.wikesjo at cypoint.se
Cc:  
Subject: Re: amd64/128263: [panic] 2 amd64 dl380 g5 with dual quadcore xeons,
 8 and 16gb ram, crash and dump mem
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:30:41 +0200

 Sorry for the late follow up. Since this has been rated as "serious" and 
 with a "high" priority, yet I have recieved no real feedback I haven't 
 put much effort into reporting anymore.
 Anyhow, we have been having the same issues with a few more machines 
 now. Random spontaneous crashes.
 
 I do suspect faulty hardware, more specifically RAM or CPU.
 But since the errors I see don't provide me any proof I am unable to 
 convince our hardware vendor, HP, that they are broken. I have ran the 
 HP diagnostics for 7 loops as HP recommends, and it reports no errors.
 I have also recompiled the kernel on one of these machines with "options 
 PRINTF_BUFR_SIZE=128" to see if the output would be more than just 
 garbage, but it did not help.
 
 We will attempt to upgrade one machine to 7.2 next week to see if it 
 will produce better error logs if/when they crash again(or maybe we'll 
 be incredibly lucky and its a software bug that is now fixed).
 
 FWIW, these machine are part of a large online gaming platform. It has 
 well over 100 more of these machines with the same hardware and FreeBSD 
 setup.
 
 If someone could look into this that would be much appreciated.