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

[Peter Jeremy]

On Wed, 2005-Jan-12 13:36:04 -0800, Rick Updegrove wrote:
>Fatal trap 12: page fault while in kernel mode
>fault virtual address	= 0x4d
>fault code		= supervisor read, page not present
>instruction pointer	= 0x8:0xc061c642

That's a NULL pointer dereference.  It's not necessarily hardware.

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

Two problems:
1) The kernel is /boot/kernel/kernel (sysctl kern.bootfile)
2) You're extremely unlikely to find a symbol at that address.
   What you need to do is
   $ nm -n `sysctl kern.bootfile` | less
   and search for the symbol closest to but no greater than 0xc061c642

This still isn't enough information to reveal anything useful.  As a
minimum, you need to enable DDB ("options DDB" and "options KDB") and
get a backtrace after the panic.  If you don't already have one, a
serial console will make things much easier.  A crashdump or gdb
session would be much better.

>> 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.

That doesn't totally rule out hardware.  Pattern-sensitive memory
problems may not show up on different operating systems (or even
different kernels).  That said, based on the trap information, I'd
look at a software cause first.

-- 
Peter Jeremy