Freebsd 8.0 system freeze

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Dec 02, 2009 at 04:22:13PM +0000, Peter Pieczora wrote:
> I recently upgraded from 7.2-STABLE to 8.0-RELEASE, and I'm encountering 
> frequent system freezes (hang ups), which end in a reboot.
> 
> There is no indication of any panic, no messages are generated and no core 
> dump files (sysctl kern.coredump=1).

Are you sure?  The crash dumps may be being generated (hard to say for
certain), but usually savecore will pick them up by analysing swap when
the system comes up next.

However, out-of-the-box, FreeBSD will not make a crash dump in swap,
because /etc/defaults/rc.conf contains dumpdev="NO".

If you change this to "AUTO", it will automatically pick the device
associated with swap based on /etc/fstab (or you can set it yourself).

Taken from the rc.conf man page:

dumpdev     (str) Indicates the device (usually a swap partition) to
            which a crash dump should be written in the event of a system
            crash.  If the value of this variable is ``AUTO'', the first
            suitable swap device listed in /etc/fstab will be used as
            dump device.  Otherwise, the value of this variable is passed
            as the argument to dumpon(8).  To disable crash dumps, set
            this variable to ``NO''.

Finally, you should be aware of the below issue.  It's been a while
since I've tested for its existence (we're now into the RELENG_8 days,
not 6), but it may still apply -- I haven't checked.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=118255&cat=
http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-stable@freebsd.org/msg92323.html

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
> 
> System runs on IBM T43 with intel wireless chipset, iwi modules are loaded 
> during boot via /boot/loader.conf. 
> 
> legal.intel_iwi.license_ack=1
> if_iwi_load="YES"
> wlan_load="YES"
> firmware_load="YES"
> iwi_bss_load="YES"
> iwi_ibss_load="YES"
> iwi_monitor_load="YES
> 
> Typically msg. look something like that or similar (iwi0 line gets repeated 
> twice or 3 times):
> 
> Dec  1 22:02:12 local kernel: wlan0: link state changed to DOWN
> Dec  1 22:02:19 local kernel: wlan0: link state changed to UP
> Dec  1 22:02:19 local kernel: iwi0: need multicast update callback
> Dec  1 22:02:30 local kernel: wlan0: link state changed to DOWN
> Dec  1 22:04:14 local syslogd: kernel boot file is /boot/kernel/kernel
> 
> Is anyone else seeing this?
> 
> ATM I am at work using bge0 interface and system runs without freezing so far. 
> Could this situation be attributed to iwi driver or maybe wlandev?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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