4.8-RELEASE problems

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Andrew Bogecho" <andrewb at cs.mcgill.ca> writes:

> I had initially suspected bad interaction with the new raid card so I
> removed the card, but still had the same problem when using a local disk.

Hmm.  Is there any kind of power-saving functionality enabled in the BIOS?

> I then run memtest from the ports and got the following errors on the
> "first" run:
> 
>   Test 15:          Walking Ones:  Testing...  47
> FAILURE: 0x00020000 != 0x00010000 at offset 0x01efcb30.
> Skipping to next test...
>   Test 16:        Walking Zeroes:  Testing...  52
> FAILURE: 0xffffefff != 0xfffff7ff at offset 0x0101bbc0.
> Skipping to next test...
> 
> But, no errors for any of the continuing runs. Is memory a problem here?

That does look suspicious, all right.  You could try running memtest
again from time to time.  

> I had initially installed FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, that run very well, but nis
> and amd would die every 24 hours. As these were "very" necessary services,
> I decided to go back to 4.x. On 5.0-RELEASE there were no reboots at all.

You could always try -CURRENT, I suppose.  A little risky, but
probably less so for production use than 5.0-RELEASE was.  

> How should I proceed now? I am thinking of maybe only running a single CPU
> kernel to see if that runs better.

Not likely to matter, but worth a try, anyway.

You could run a low-priority CPU-hogging job (or several) to see if
it's really connected to low usage levels, or if it's actually
time-sensitive.