5.4-p1 crash

[Mitch Parks]

On Sun, 19 Jun 2005, Robert Watson wrote:

>> there is a PR for it : kern/74319
>
> This sounds very similar to a serial console related tty bug I was 
> experiencing on -STABLE a few months ago, and that is believed may have been 
> worked around in 5.4 tweaks before release.  In particular, that there are 
> reference counting related bugs in the 5.x tty code that are fixed by a 
> partial rewrite of the tty code in 6.x, but that are too large and disruptive 
> to merge to RELENG_5.  If the problem is persisting, it may be worth trying 
> to merge anyway, but it is a pretty big change and would break device driver 
> binary compatibility, etc.  What we might want to do here is wait until 6.x 
> has settled out a bit more, then consider merging it to 5.x once 6.x has 
> gotten burned in with similar workloads and continued to not illustrate the 
> 5.x tty reference bugs.

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, Doug White wrote:

> I've run out of time to debug this, unfortunately...

I went back to reports I made in January about 5.3:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-January/010898.html
which appears to be the same issue. I _thought_ this was resolved when I 
disabled HT, but maybe I was just lucky between the last reboot and the 5.4 
upgrade.

It sounds like there's a reasonable chance this has been squashed in code 
for 6.0? Since this box is already unstable, I'd be tempted to be an early 6 
adopter to see if it is actually resolved. Especially so if that would be 
helpful to the cause.

Otherwise, I guess I need to look at going back to 4.X or 5.2.1, which were 
completely stable on this box. I have time to deal with this over the next 6 
weeks, but much less so after that.

Any suggestions?

Mitch Parks
mitch at uidaho.edu