kernel panic 6.2-RELEASE SMP dual quad core

Iain Dooley iain at workingsoftware.com.au
Sat Dec 29 21:51:27 PST 2007


hi ivan,

>> 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.
>
> Are you using PAE? (probably not if this is the generic SMP configuration).

no, i checked and i'm not using PAE.

>> current process = 12 (idle: cpu5)
>
> This is important. The "idle" process does literary nothing and is
> highly unlikely to contain a bug.
>
> Does this mean that the problem only appears when the system is idle?

hmm maybe i should leave the system idle and see if it crashes again :) 
i've been running an application which just loads up RAM with lots of 
processes keeping at least 32 processes running at all times. each script 
is killed when it uses too much space. the machine hasn't crashed again 
for like 2 days.

i'm going away so i might leave it idle for that time and see if it 
crashes again. i've got a dump device setup this time which will give me 
more information to send into the list.

> By the way, you are likely not to get any performance benefits (and some
> performance regressions are likely) with this number of CPUs on FreeBSD
> 6.2, except if you intend to do CPU-intensive tasks (like scientific
> caluclations). If you can, try the latest release candidate of 7.0.

i'm just running a web application on it. it's a total pain though. i 
should have just bought a late model second hand p4 or something rather 
than a state of the art machine. i'm too out of touch with modern hardware 
to have known what i was getting myself into. live and learn i guess.

cheers

iain


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