Spontaneous reboots with splash

[Ernie Luzar]

Andrea Venturoli wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I've got a problem with a 10.1/i386 box which sometimes reboots 
> spontaneously: no crash dump, no message, nothing; only a sudden reboot 
> with nothing in the logs.
> I even added INVARIANTS, WITNESS, SOCKBUF_DEBUG, DEBUG_VFS_LOCKS, 
> DEBUG_MEMGUARD and DIAGNOSTIC to my kernel conf: nothing changed.
> 
> I tried putting DDB into the picture, but it won't be brough up; again a 
> plain reboot.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> While doing all my tests (and kernel compilations), I was able to see a 
> lot of reboots happening when the consoles screen saver starts or a key 
> is pressed to get back to the console.
> In /boot/loader.conf I've got:
> splash_bmp_load="YES"
> bitmap_load="YES"
> bitmap_name="/boot/splash.bmp"
> 
> The above image will appear on boot and as soon as the keyboard is not 
> used for a while.
> 
> With these settings, a "make kernel" will only seldom get to the end.
> 
> In fact, after putting 'blanktime="NO"' in /etc/rc.conf, I tried "make 
> kernel" several times: no problem ever.
> 
> So I thought my kernel might have something wrong and I tried GENERIC, 
> getting the same results.
> 
> although I've been using this setup for maybe 15 years, I'm starting to 
> think splash has something wrong!!!
> 
> Has anyone else experienced this?
> 
> Any hint on how to get sure data?
> I know I could just disable splash and easily live with it (that's in 
> fact what I'll do for now), but I'd feel more comfortable if I could get 
> straight down to the cause.
> 
> Any help appreciated.
> 
> 
>  bye & Thanks
>     av.
> 
> 

Read the handbook section about splash.
Your splash.bmp file has to be under 320x200 in size. For a bmp file 
over that size you need to also load the VESA module.

vesa_load="YES"