Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Mark Saad]

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On Sep 13, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Andriy Gapon <avg at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> on 13/09/2012 22:57 Mark Felder said the following:
>> On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:28:15 -0500, Kurt Lidl <lidl at pix.net> wrote:
>> 
>>> Isn't this what you want?
>>> 
>>> http://stackframe.blogspot.com/2007/04/debugging-linux-kernels-with.html
>>> 
>>> -Kurt
>> 
>> Interesting -- it looks like that's an option on ESX as well. The only question
>> is: what do I do with that? It's going to give me the debugging entire VM, not
>> the kernel inside. Without being a VMWare developer I imagine its data will be a
>> bit useless :-(
> 
> No, gdb stub is for debugging what is running inside the VM.
> E.g. look here for an example of how to do that with qemu:
> http://andriygapon.wikispaces.com/QemuSetup
> VMWare with gdb stub enabled should not be any different.
> 
> -- 
> Andriy Gapon
> _____________________________


Mark did you try changing the time counter choice sysctl from hpet to Acpi-safe/fast or tsc ?  In esx 4.1 an newer using hpet timers causes issues for bsd and linux vms in some cases . 

The sysctl is kern.timecounter.choice . This sounds like another VMware issues I have seen and read about . See this post http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-32104.html

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Mark saad | mark.saad at longcount.org