EM stability

[Barry Boes]

After the last hang I added giant locks back in and the machine has
been up since.

I don't have a serial console, just a graphic console.  When the
machine hangs it stops replying to ethernet packets at all protocol
levels and doesn't respond to keyboard input in any way, virtual
console or otherwise.  If I run a script of the form
   while(1)
     sleep 1
     date >> datelog
   end

the file stops updating when the machine hangs.

I will define the debugger in the kernel (options DDB, right?), attach
a serial console, and do what I can to get more information on the
problem.

-Barry


Jack Vogel writes:
 > On 11/10/06, Barry Boes <barry.boes at acciodata.com> wrote:
 > >
 > > Luck ran out.  Hard "must press the reset button" hang.  No console
 > > messages.   The system was idle at the time.
 > >    Is there anything you'd like me to do to attempt to narrow down the
 > > problem or get debugging output?  I do not know if the freeze was
 > > related to em or something else.
 > 
 > Is this a machine running some graphic head? If not can you see anything
 > on the console? Are you sure the machine is dead, like can you get in
 > over the network... ? One thing I often do when you are dealing with
 > unpredictable hangs is run 'vmstat 3' on one of the virtual terminals.
 > 
 > You might also define the kernel debugger into your kernel, its best to have
 > a serial console for this, I've seen the hardware console be locked but the
 > serial will still work.
 > 
 > The only way we will track this down is thru repetitive reproduction I'm
 > afraid.
 > 
 > Jack