5.4-RC1 Freezing, but pingable (may be related to gvinum)

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, 2005-Apr-09 14:51:41 -0500, Ash wrote:
>By "hang" I mean that the machine stops responding to console keystrokes 
>(serial or otherwise) while existing ssh and nfs connections stop 
>responding, but do not immediately close. The machine continues to 
>respond to ICMP pings. I can not make new SSH connections and my 
>attempts eventually timeout rather than giving me a connection refused 
>error.

This is consistent with the kernel continuing to run normally but being
unable to schedule userland processes - usually due to a deadlock.

Do the caps-lock, num-lock, scroll-lock buttons on a local keyboard
still toggle the relevant LEDs?

Assuming the LEDs toggle: Do you have "options DDB" and "options KDB"
in your kernel?  If so, can you break into DDB?  (If not, I think
you'll need to build a kernel with DDB).  Once the system has hung,
you need to enter DDB and run 'ps'.  The output from that will give
(hopefully) give an indication as to what is going wrong (and where to
look next).  If you've build the kernel with debugging symbols and got
a dump device enabled, "call doadump()" should also generate a
crashdump which will be much easier to examine.

Peter