How to report bugs (Re: 6.2-STABLE deadlock?)

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 12:14:20PM +0400, Oleg Derevenetz wrote:

> > Until you (or a developer) have analyzed the resulting information,
> > you cannot definitively determine whether or not your problem is the
> > same as a given random other problem, and you may just confuse the
> > issue by making claims of similarity when you are really reporting a
> > completely separate problem.
> 
> Not all people can do deadlock debugging, though. In my case turning on 
> INVARIANTS and WITNESS leads to unacceptable performance penalty due to heavily 
> loaded server. So I can only describe my case, actions and result without 
> providing any debug information.

But you can still do *some* things, e.g. backtraces and/or a coredump:
every little bit helps.

Ultimately, though, you have to understand and accept that the less
information you provide, the less chance there is that a developer
will be able to track down your problem.  In fact a developer may have
to effectively ignore your problem report altogether, because of what
I explained about "symptoms" usually not being enough to tell one bug
from another.

In general, when you encounter a bug in FreeBSD, you have a little bit
of work to do on your side before we can start doing the rest.  I
understand that you may not be in a position to do that work, but that
means you also need to understand that we can't do it either.

Kris
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