lockup in FreeBSD 5.1

[Benjamin Lutz]

Hi,

I have a friend for whom I installed FreeBSD 5.1. Recently, the box has started acting up... programs like dhclient would freeze, driving the load up to above 3. If killed, some other program would freeze minutes later.

I've been puzzled by this behaviour, since I run 5.1 on two other machines without problems, and I haven't heard anything like this from others running 5.1. Maybe someone has an insight?

The interesting thing is - today I was "watching" the machine with top, while she used it normaly  (me = maxlor, her = theres). Below you find what top displayed before the machine went offline (I assume she powercycled it). The interesting thing is that multiple processes seem to be locked in Giant... could this be a driver issue?

On the hardware side, we have an old K6 machine, with some NIC that uses the vr driver; the other stuff I can't remember right now.

Anyone have an idea what I can do about this?

Greetings
Benjamin

top output:
last pid:   716;  load averages:  3.63,  0.98,  0.59  up 0+01:09:30  23:33:30
29 processes:  2 running, 21 sleeping, 6 lock
CPU states:  0.1% user,  0.0% nice, 98.5% system,  1.2% interrupt,  0.1% idle
Mem: 31M Active, 6600K Inact, 24M Wired, 6064K Cache, 18M Buf, 14M Free
Swap: 155M Total, 14M Used, 140M Free, 9% Inuse, 12K In

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  406 root     -16    0  3284K   712K spread   2:16 25.83% 25.83% sshd
  602 theres    96    0  9600K  4660K *Giant   5:09  7.81%  7.81% xmms
  505 theres    96    0 25768K 14460K *Giant   4:15  1.12%  1.12% XFree86
  524 theres    96    0 13160K  5784K *Giant   0:38  0.54%  0.54% xchat
  565 maxlor    96    0  2144K   872K RUN      0:07  0.00%  0.00% top
  451 root      96    0  1152K   472K *Giant   0:07  0.00%  0.00% moused
  510 theres    96    0  6524K  2408K select   0:04  0.00%  0.00% fluxbox
  548 maxlor    96    0  6012K   904K select   0:01  0.00%  0.00% sshd
  532 root       4    0  6028K   900K sbwait   0:00  0.00%  0.00% sshd
  268 root      96    0  1232K   580K *Giant   0:00  0.00%  0.00% syslogd
  216 root      96    0  1128K   348K *Giant   0:00  0.00%  0.00% dhclient
  424 root       8    0  1260K   640K nanslp   0:00  0.00%  0.00% cron
  549 maxlor    20    0  1412K   196K pause    0:00  0.00%  0.00% csh
  490 root       8    0  1540K   524K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% su
  491 theres    20    0  1256K    12K pause    0:00  0.00%  0.00% csh
  504 theres     8    0  2460K   844K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% xinit
  492 theres     8    0   864K    12K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  358 root      96    0  1160K   444K RUN      0:00  0.00%  0.00% usbd
  483 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  488 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  486 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  482 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  485 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  487 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  484 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  489 root       5    0  1200K   544K ttyin    0:00  0.00%  0.00% getty
  601 theres     8    0   860K    12K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  523 theres     8    0   860K    32K wait     0:00  0.00%  0.00% sh
  142 root      20    0   224K    12K pause    0:00  0.00%  0.00% adjkerntz