A stuck system

[Ricardo Nabinger Sanchez]

On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 05:48:34 -0500
Randall Stewart <rrs at cisco.com> wrote:

> Nope... its just a single port, on-motherboard msk0.
> 
> It does wake up though if I ping any interface...
> 
> I suspect it might be a hardware problem.. not sure
> yet :-0

How about installing a ping trap in the device driver to generate a dump?
What I mean is to, whenever the device driver receives a packet, it checks if
the packet is a special ping packet (with some specific data, like
"dumpdump..." in the data field), and if so, forces a dump so you can check
(luckily) where the system came from.

It's a long shot, but perhaps it gives a hint.

Does this behavior happens on IA-64 boxes?  If so, the kernel could set up
the processor to save performance data (specifically the branch history), and
the special ping (or something else) could be used to print the branch buffer
history, instead of dumping a core.  Debugging symbols would be a must, I
believe.

-- 
Ricardo Nabinger Sanchez     <rnsanchez@{gmail.com,wait4.org}>
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