kernel panic 6.2-RELEASE SMP dual quad core

[Kris Kennaway]

Iain Dooley wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> uname -a
> FreeBSD HOSTNAME 6.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE #0: Fri Jan 12 11:05:30 
> UTC 2007 root at dessler.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SMP  i386
> 
> running on dual quad core intel xeons with 4gb ram.
> 
> my server has been rebooting quite a bit and stopped responding today. i 
> found this on the console:
> 
> Fatal trap: 12 page fault while in kernel mode
> cpuid = 5; apic id = 05
> fault virtual address = 0x0
> fault code = supervisor write, page not present
> instruction pointer = 0x20:0xc0880472
> stack pointer = 0x28:0xe6ea9c8c
> code segment = base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
>              = DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
> processor eflags = resume, IOPL = 0
> current process = 12 (idle: cpu5)
> trap number = 12
> panic: page fault
> cpuid = 5
> uptime 24m41s
> cannot dump. no dump device specified
> 
> i've configured the dump device and will follow the kernel debugging 
> details in the handbook if it happens again but i thought i'd write in 
> now in case the cause of the problem jumped out at anyone.
> 
> i've run mprime for 24 hours, and memtest for 3 passes, and a script i 
> wrote which just exhausts ram and CPU, then backs off and does it again 
> which have been running for 24 hours.
> 
> i've also just started running this:
> 
> http://www.holm.cc/stress/
> 
> i noticed that the same "fatal trap 12" appeared during stress tests as 
> listed here:
> 
> http://people.freebsd.org/~pho/stress/log/cons224.html
> 
> any help, guidance or information would be much appreciated.

What you have so far is close to meaningless.  The "fault virtual 
address = 0x0" means little more than "somewhere in the kernel there was 
a null pointer dereference".  The fact that it was the idle process is 
suspicious though, it suggests that hardware failure is a high 
probability.  Please follow up with the backtrace if you want to pursue 
this further.

Kris