Quality of FreeBSD

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Joao Barros wrote:

> I was hopping for you to mention user's feedback. I started this thread 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2005-July/052288.html 
> back with SNAP004. The problem is still present in BETA1. I haven't seen 
> any more advances in the thread, and I know this must be a very 
> localized issue, and that everyone is pretty busy with the upcoming 
> release but I wouldn't want this issue forgotten. Should I submit a PR? 
> As this is a kernel issue, I'm pretty much stuck to 5, although I would 
> prefer start using 6.

I would suggest always filling a PR if you worry the problem is going to 
get lost.  While PR's can also get lost, they tend to persist more than 
old e-mails.

There are two likely causes of problems:

(1) amr driver problems
(2) General PCI/interrupt/ACPI/APIC problems

The last few functional changes to amr were by Paull Saab (ps@) and Scott 
Long (scottl@), and I'd be tempted to try to chase that option first.  The 
first question to answer is whether you can get into the debugger using a 
console or serial break, as that will tell us what sort of "hang" you're 
seeing.

You can find detailed instructions for kernel debugging in the handbook. 
Try adding BREAK_TO_DEBUGGER, KDB, and KDB as a first step, and see if a 
break gets you to the debugger or not.  If you can get into the debugger, 
submit the information to the PR, forward me the PR receipt, and I'll try 
assigning it to one of the above and see if we can get someone to take 
some interest in it.

If you can't get into the debugger, it's more likely an interrupt/etc 
problem.  We might try John Baldwin (jhb@) as a possible first contact.

Robert N M Watson