disk spinning continuously + cpu possibly overheating = sudden death

[Manish Jain]

   Hello all,
   I am running FreeBSD-8.2-amd64 on a Western Digital 320 GD disk and a
   quad-core AMD Phenom processor. After booting, the disk keeps
   continuously (meaning continuous I/O) and after a couple of hours (on
   the console with the X server not running), suddenly the whole system
   dies, powering off in a flash. I suspect the continuous I/O is causing
   is a CPU overheat which results in this behaviour. The strange thing
   is when I ran a script to ktrace and kdump, there is no sign of any
   unwarranted I/O. Can anyone suggest what possibly be wrong with my
   system ? I have disabled as much as possible in rc.conf and
   syslog.conf to prevent I/O. My script and the output are pasted below.
   BTW, the system runs flawlessly both on Win XP and FreeBSD-8.0-amd64.
   The reason I do not want to install FreeBSD-8.0-amd64 is that its Logo
   saver, one of my al-time favourites, does not work. In 8.2, it does
   work. One thing I should mention is that, apart from swap, I have only
   one partition / (35 GB). No other mountpoints.
   BTW, does FreeBSD have anything like Linux badblocks to check for any
   bad sectors in hard disks ?
   Thanks for any help.
   Regards
   Manish Jain
   [1]invalid.pointer at gmail.com
   #!/usr/local/bin/bash
   ktrace -dip 0
   sleep 10
   ktrace -C
   kdump -m64 | egrep '\<read\>|\<write\>' > ~/diskio.log
   exit 0
   Here are the results :
     1640 bash     CALL  read(0xff,0x800e23080,0x77)
     1640 bash     GIO   fd 255 read 82 bytes
     1640 bash     RET   read 82/0x52
     1642 sleep    CALL  read(0x3,0x7fffffffe170,0x80)
     1642 sleep    GIO   fd 3 read 128 bytes
     1642 sleep    RET   read 128/0x80
     1642 sleep    CALL  read(0x3,0x800533000,0xb4)
     1642 sleep    GIO   fd 3 read 180 bytes
     1642 sleep    RET   read 180/0xb4
     1642 sleep    GIO   fd 3 read 4096 bytes
      858 ppp      CALL  read(0,0x801420140,0x800)
      858 ppp      GIO   fd 0 read 18 bytes
      858 ppp      RET   read 18/0x12
      858 ppp      CALL  read(0,0x801420140,0x800)
      858 ppp      GIO   fd 0 read 53 bytes
      858 ppp      RET   read 53/0x35
      858 ppp      CALL  write(0x6,0x7fffffffd980,0x34)
      858 ppp      RET   write 52/0x34
      858 ppp      CALL  read(0x6,0x7fffffffe320,0x804)
      858 ppp      GIO   fd 6 read 44 bytes
      858 ppp      RET   read 44/0x2c
      858 ppp      CALL  write(0,0x80145b138,0x2d)
      858 ppp      RET   write 45/0x2d
      858 ppp      CALL  read(0,0x801420140,0x800)
      858 ppp      GIO   fd 0 read 53 bytes
      858 ppp      RET   read 53/0x35
      858 ppp      CALL  write(0x6,0x7fffffffd980,0x34)
      858 ppp      RET   write 52/0x34
      858 ppp      CALL  read(0x6,0x7fffffffe320,0x804)
      858 ppp      GIO   fd 6 read 44 bytes
      858 ppp      RET   read 44/0x2c
      858 ppp      CALL  write(0,0x80145b338,0x2e)
      858 ppp      RET   write 46/0x2e
     1640 bash     CALL  read(0xff,0x800e23080,0x77)
     1640 bash     GIO   fd 255 read 73 bytes
       kdump -m64 | egrep '\\<read\\>|\\<write\\>' > ~/diskio.log"
     1640 bash     RET   read 73/0x49
     1643 ktrace   CALL  read(0x3,0x7fffffffe140,0x80)
     1643 ktrace   GIO   fd 3 read 128 bytes
     1643 ktrace   RET   read 128/0x80
     1643 ktrace   CALL  read(0x3,0x800534000,0xb4)
     1643 ktrace   GIO   fd 3 read 180 bytes
     1643 ktrace   RET   read 180/0xb4
     1643 ktrace   GIO   fd 3 read 4096 bytes

References

   1. mailto:invalid.pointer at gmail.com