5.3-RELEASE crashes during make buildworld (and other problems)

[Rick Updegrove]

Lowell Gilbert wrote:

 > That should be "dumpdir", not "DUMPDIR".
 > The default would be /var/crash instead of /usr/crash.
 > Also, /dev/ad0s1b has to be bigger than your RAM size.

Thank you very much for the reply Lowell,

That DUMPDIR was silly of me, thank you for pointing it out.

I have 1.5 GIGS of RAM and /var is 248 MEGS which is self-explanatory.

 > You can try to analyze the panic messages themselves.
 > There is some guidance for this in the FAQ.

The guidence I read at in the developer's handbook
suggests I obtain a crashdump and post to the list because the info 
found in a panic (example of one of mine below) is not enough.

Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
fault virtual address	= 0x4d
fault code		= supervisor read, page not present
instruction pointer	= 0x8:0xc061c642
stack pointer		= 0x10:0xf00e1cc4
frame pointer		= 0x10:0xf00e1cd0
code segment		= base 0x0, limit 0xfffff, type 0x1b
			= DPL 0, pres 1, def32 1, gran 1
processor eflags	= interrupt enabled, resume, IOPL - 0
current process		= 1009 (kdeinit)
trap number		= 12
panic: page fault
Uptime: 21m8s

So, I am still trying to obtain a dump.

Thanks to your reply, I did re-read #KERNEL-PANIC-TROUBLESHOOTING more 
carefully and I did try the following.

rickup at nothing$ nm -n /boot/kernel | grep c061c642
nm: Warning: '/boot/kernel' is not an ordinary file

Any ideas on that?  The reason I did not try that first was I mistakenly 
thought I had to first capture the crash dump for some reason.

 > Hardware problems would be my first suspicion here.

Me too... if it were not for the fact 5.3-RELEASE is the only OS that 
has problems on this hardware.

 > If you try it again, does it fail in the same place?

No it does not fail in the same place every time but I still do not 
suspect hardware per se.

For more details on why I believe that statement, please see:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-January/011034.html

Thanks again for the reply it was helpful.

Rick