6.1-RELEASE / 6.2 Kernel Crash...

[Jan Knepper]

Understood... and exactly as I wrote...
Not impossible, but not that likely...

Thanks!
Jan



Mike Meyer wrote:
> In <4592690B.7080800 at digitaldaemon.com>, Jan Knepper <jan at digitaldaemon.com> typed:
>   
>> FreeBSD 5.x branch run on that machine for almost 2 years without a 
>> problem and magically the same time period in *hours* that I upgrade the 
>> machine I get hardware problems too? Not an impossible coincidence, but 
>> not very likely...
>>     
>
> Or it could be that you have a hardware problem in hardware that
> wasn't used by 5.x but is by 6.x.
>
> <Storytime>
> I had an 11/750 that ran BSD 4.2 for years with no problems. When I
> tried to upgrade it to BSD 4.3, it would reliably panic in namei
> during the boot process. We had about a dozen 750s, and this was our
> test machine - so none of them were going to be upgraded until this
> got fixed, deadline or no.
>
> Stepping through namei in the debugger showed that one of the
> instructions in the function prelude was changing a high bit in a
> register it wasn't supposed to touch at all. In 4.2, the register was
> unused, because namei got passed a handful of arguments. In 4.3, it
> got passed a pointer to a struct with some of that information in it,
> and the pointer wound up in said register. Dereferencing the pointer
> caused the panic.
>
> A motherboard replacement solved the problem.
>
> </Storytime>
>
> 	<mike
>