freebsd dies freequently

[Matthew Seaman]

On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 10:39:32PM -0500, Jian Guang Xu wrote:
> I'm experiencing frequent freeze in my FreeBSD with out any error
> message. I don't know what exactly the reason is and I can only put my
> current dead system information here:
> The system is 5.3RC1, KDE, Firefox without flash plugin yet, Konsole
> is dong "make install clean" at /usr/ports/www/mozilla.
> 
> This is a dual boot machine with W2K in the first 25G and FreeBSD in
> the rest. The CPU is AMD Athlon 1600+ and 1024 Giga Ram, 3 sticks with
> 512mb+256mb+256mb. GeForce 2 with 32 MB, AC97 on board Audio device.
> 
> Most of the dying time for BSD is when I doing online surfing using
> firefox without Flash plugin. Another thing need to be noticed is that
> my /var is an independent partition approaching 83% at least.
> 
> It would be great that if somebody could at least point me somewhere
> to go. Thank you in advance.

What exactly are you seeing when your FreeBSD box goes down?  There
should be output on the console, and there might be something logged
in /var/log/messages.

If you're seeing any mention of 'SEGV' or 'Signal 11' then start by
suspecting your hardware.  This can be due to bad memory, bad CPU or
even something as simple as the system overheating.  However,
overheating more usually shows itself as the system suddenly blacking
out as the thermal cutout operates.  Note that it is quite possible
for these sort of problems to only show up under FreeBSD and not other
operating systems.  It's a matter of pot luck as to whether any
particular system gets bitten.

For diagnosing memory problems, the memtest86 program is very useful
(although it cannot guarrantee that it won't generate the occasional
false negatives):

    http://www.memtest86.com/

If you can rule out hardware troubles and can't otherwise find the
problem, see:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/developers-handbook/kerneldebug.html

Generating a traceback from a core dump is the sort of information
necessary for a developer to debug the problem.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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