upgrade from 4.8 SMP to 4.9 SMP causes unexplained rebooting!

[Eugene Grosbein]

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