Spontaneous Reboots (I thought it was Virtualbox Kernel Modules)

[Chris Maness]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Robert Bonomi
<bonomi at mail.r-bonomi.com> wrote:
>> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Tue Aug 24 12:29:16 2010
>> Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:29:27 -0700
>> From: Chris Maness <chris at chrismaness.com>
>> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>> Subject: Spontaneous Reboots (I thought it was Virtualbox Kernel Modules)
>>
>> I have commented out the lines that load kernel modules for
>> virtualbox, and made sure they were gone with kldstat. However I am
>> still getting VERY infrequent spontaneous reboots.  So it is not the
>> modules.  I am thinking hardware.  It has a temperature alarm that
>> sounds when it is hot, but since I have cleaned it out I have not had
>> any issues with heat.  I am thinking bad processor/ram.  It is
>> behaving the same way before/after the upgraded to the latest release.
>>  What do you guys think?
>
> I think its 100% certain that it is hardware, or software.  <*GRIN*>
>
> You can try randomly replacing things, which can be expensive, time-
> consuming, and not necessarily effective -- how do you *KNOW* that the
> parts you're putting _IN_ do not, themselves, have (as-yet undiscovered)
> problems?
>
> I'd try to make the box tell me "something" about *why* it crashed.
>
> crank up the level of logging for 'kernel' events in syslog.con,
> enable crash dumps, and make sure the boot process saves the dump
> Then you can get into the weird,wonderful, world of 'crash dump'
> analysis.
>
> With a few dumps in hand, you can begin to see if there is any consistency
> in what the machine was doing -when- it crashed.
>
> Happy hunting
>

When I looked at the regular level kernel log, it seemed  to be out of
the clear blue.  I am an experienced user, but I am not sure if I have
the programing skills to look at debug output to find a fault.  I
might need a bit of hand holding on this one.  I looked at backtrace
to.  I was thinking it was a command or something, but it looks like
some debugging procedure.

Regards,
Chris Maness