periodic freeze and reset

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

I have had crashes too on my machine with the 6.2 RELEASE kernel. They 
are gone since I use a custom kernel.

The fun is that I have t use the rl NIC driver like you do.

Erich

Ghirai wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Sep 2007 17:46:54 -0400
> Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
> 
>> Ghirai <ghirai at ghirai.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 3 Sep 2007 16:31:41 -0400
>>> Bill Moran <wmoran at potentialtech.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Ghirai <ghirai at ghirai.com> wrote:
>>>>> Hello list,
>>>>>
>>>>> My desktop running 6.2-STABLE is freezing then resetting shortly after.
>>>>> This behaviour happens every couple hours, for no apparent reason.
>>>>>
>>>>> I checked messages, etc, there's nothing there.
>>>>>
>>>>> This is getting annoying... :/
>>>>>
>>>>> I'd appreciate any hints/where to look/what to look for.
>>>> My first guess would be hardware problems.  Have you run memtest?
>>>> Checked for cooling problems?  cpuburn to test for a flaky CPU?
>>>>
>>> Haven't ran any hw monitors/test, but i spend time periodically in windows,
>>> about 2-3 days each time, and it didn't crash reset.
>>>
>>> That's why i think there are no hw issues.
>>>
>>> In FreeBSD the freeze+resets occur and seemingly random intervals, but
>>> not longer than 30 hours. Mostly within 6 hours.
>> That seems to suggest that it isn't hardware, but doesn't completely
>> eliminate the possibility.
>>
>> Often, vendors write drivers to work around known deficiencies in their
>> hardware.  Since FreeBSD's drivers are written to the specs, they may
>> expose these deficiencies while the vendor's drivers intentionally avoid
>> them.
>>
>> Additionally, FreeBSD seems to work hardware in different ways than
>> Windows, thus tickling corner cases with hardware that's just barely
>> failing.  Run some hardware tests to be sure.
>>
>> Also, the driver issue that was raised is a good point.  I've seen a
>> number of buggy NICs where the vendor's driver worked around the
>> bugginess so it _looked_ like FreeBSD was at fault.
>>
>> Make sure all your hardware is known to work on FreeBSD.
>>
> 
> 
> All right, i'll do some tests with the NIC, change it, etc.
> I'll post back results.
> 
> Thanks.
>