7.0-BETA1 & 2 occasionally freezing, how to diagnose?

[Doug Poland]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 12:48:35PM +1100, Norberto Meijome wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:24:09 -0600
> Doug Poland <doug at polands.org> wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I've been having frequent problems with BETA1 and now BETA2
> > "freezing".  There is no diagnostic information, nothing in
> > /var/log/messages, nothing, just a hung interface.  I cannot ssh
> > into the machine and it appears the box ceases to communicate on
> > SSH. A couple of times I've had screen corruption on the laptop's
> > LCD display.
> > 
> > Every time it hands I'm running Xorg 7.3, Thunderbird, Firefox,
> > pidgin, and a bunch of xterms.
> > 
> > Is there something I can do to diagnose this issue?
> > 
> 
> hi Doug,
> My laptops is freezing like this too - no corruption on display though
> (this is the 2nd time i write this email, as it just happened <G>). I
> am still not sure what the cause is...some things I've used / tried:
> 
> I was using gjournal on my 80 GB /usr  partition, with a 1.5 journal
> to ad01sh . I was getting quite often lockups where it seemed the disk
> subsystem would stall - anything in memory would work, but as soon as
> disk access was needed, it'd stall too. Rebooting was not an option,
> as the shutdown watchdog would timeout and stop it.
> 
> furthermore, I'd have to go into single user and run fsck
> /dev/ad0s1f.journal every time the laptop would crash. I seemed to
> have much fewer bad information in the inodes (thanks to the journal),
> but I was getting 4 or 6 crashes a day. Since I switched away from
> gjournal, these crashes have completely gone away. since this is my
> main machine, i cant experiment too much with it.
> 
> I also had skype-1.4 running . One of its processes was spinning
> completely out of control , when i wasn't using skype at all (other
> than receiving text msgs). I sent an email about it to Multimedia.I've
> since switched back to skype.1.2 and that problem is also gone.
> 
> But i still get the occasional lockup. I have a feeling it is related
> to using the sound card :
> 
> $ cat /dev/sndstat 
> FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm: 32bit 2007061600/i386)
> Installed devices:
> pcm0: <Intel 82801F High Definition Audio Controller> at memory 0xb0000000 irq 11 kld snd_hda [20071020_0048] [MPSAFE] (1p:10v/1r:6v channels duplex default)
> 
> Pretty much everytime I'm getting a lockup, i'm either streaming music
> from my music box or on a skype call. Not much to go by, but there
> isn't any logs left at all of the crash. It is not a panic (no writing
> dump to disk when I press enter, Caps-lock is dead, even the Fn key
> which is bound to the bios is dead). What I have noticed in these
> cases is that there seems to be a lock up....then, about a minute or
> so after it, the mouse seems to come back to life...but then there's
> nothing more I can do - i've waited for over 5 minutes after this with
> no more results....
> 
It's quite likely that I have streaming audio/video going on but am
using mplayer exclusively.  Am also using new HDA controller.


-- 
Regards,
Doug