[amd64] Instability worse than ever

[Conrad J. Sabatier]

On 25-Jul-2004 Scott Long wrote:
> Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:
> 
>> For the last couple of days, my amd64 box has taken to spontaneously
>> rebooting.  No panic, no coredump, nothing in logs, just reboots.
>> 
>> These always seem to occur just as I'm clicking on something under
>> GNOME.
>> 
>> Very mysterious!
>> 
> 
> Do you have INVARIANTS turned on?

No, I really should do that.  Don't know why I hadn't already.  Duh. 
:-)

> If you do, would you be able to
> hook up a serial console and see what the kernel is saying?

Been meaning to ask about that.  Would a null modem connection from my
other machine be useable as the serial console?  I have all the kernel
config options and the sio flags set to enable the serial console, but
wasn't sure if that would work or not.  If so, I could try that.

> Also,
> a quick hack that might help you is to take either sched_4bsd.c or
> sched_ule.c (depending on which you are using) and comment out the
> call to maybe_preempt(td) in sched_add() like so:
> 
> + if 0
>       if (maybe_preempt(td))
>               return;
> + endif

OK, that's easy enough.  :-)

> I think I understand most of the underlying problem with much of the
> recent (and not so recent) instability, but I haven't come up with
> an acceptable solution yet.  If anyone is interested in helping
> (code, not test), please let me know.

I just upgraded again and rebuilt the world/kernel.  Tweaked my kernel
config a bit to simplify it.  We'll see if this problem continues or
not.

Thanks!
 
-- 
Conrad J. Sabatier <conrads at cox.net> -- "In Unix veritas"