upgrade from 4.8 SMP to 4.9 SMP causes unexplained rebooting!

[Chuck Rock]

We had the same problem. We had a mchiane to upgrade, so we thought we'd
just put a fresh install on another box, and move data.

I have not been able to get FreeBSD 4.9 to run under a heavy load on any
Dell 2450 or 2550 servers. I can' only get good results from Compaq
servers, or single CPU systems.

I also tried running  5.2.1 on three different Dell 2550's. They all
worked great under similar load testing, but when put into production, all
of them started locking up or rebooting within a few days, and it got
worse as time went on.

We finally gave up and bought a refurb Compaq, and has been running 5.2.1
in production under heavy loads for 130+ days.

Chuck

On Sun, 4 Apr 2004, Eugene Grosbein wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 01, 2004 at 11:26:13AM -0800, Rick Updegrove wrote:
>
> > A 4.8-STABLE machine I have been running with no problems for over 130
> > days straight uptime is now having unexplained reboots AFTER upgrading
> > to 4.9 STABLE.
>
> > only reason I even upgraded was due to
> > to http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.9R/errata.html
> >
> > Now I am sort of wishing I did not : )   I lost all the uptime and now
> > the unexplained rebooting...  I hesitate reporting this because most
> > people point their fingers at the hardware.  I am tempted to abandon
> > this machine for another but if anyone is interested in taking a look
> > please advise.
>
> I have similar situation. My SMP machine runs fine with pre-PAE 4.8-STABLE
> and freezes with 4.9-STABLE quite often. There is no kernel panic,
> no crashdump. So I was forced to downgrade it to 4.8-STABLE of 8 August 2003
> and keep it secure by applying patches.
>
> > I have the following:
> >
> > #/etc/rc.conf
> > #rebooting
> > dumpdev=YES
> > savecore=YES
> > dumpdir="/var/crash"
> >
> > I know ths is not quite enough - I need to configure a dump devide but I
> > have no tape drive.  Is there another way?
>
> Yes. You should have swap partition greater or equal to size of RAM
> and enough free space in /var/crash (using symlinks is OK). And point
> dumpdev to your swap like this (example!):
>
> dumpdev=/dev/ad0s1b
>
> >
> > I rebuilt this kernel with:
> >
> > makeoptions    DEBUG=-g        #Build kernel with gdb(1) debug symbols
> >
> > Is there anything else I should do?
>
> Just read section about kernel debugging in the Developer Handbook.
>
> > Right now I do not have the ability to attach a serial console to the
> > crashing system and set the system to serial console.  And even if I did
> > have physical access I am not sure how to do that exactly...
>
> It should not be necesary if you manage to get crashdump.
>
> Eugene Grosbein
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