Spontaneous reboots on Intel i5 and FreeBSD 9.0

[Thomas Mueller]

> Hello,

> Usually I ask questions on the mailing lists when things are bad and can't
> find much info about the problem myself. This is one of these cases now :)

> Recently (started something like a week or two ago) my system which was
> running months without any issues spontaneously rebooted. Nothing in the
> logs about the reboot.

> Then a few days ago it rebooted by itself a few more times, sometimes a 3-4
> times a day without a clear reason in the logs of why this happened.

> I'm monitoring the CPU temp, load, network traffic and other metrics in the
> monitoring system, but there's nothing strange there - no load, no high
> temp, no high traffic or anything that could explain why this is happening.

> The machine is connected to a UPS, so I thought this could be causing this,
> but I've tested the UPS and battery and they are all fine.

> Here's what last(1) says about today's reboot:

> ---
>      boot time                                  Fri Jan 18 00:29
> ---

> It's like the system has been rebooted normally, but that isn't the case.
> Sometimes it's logged as "crash". I've enabled crash dumps, but still
> nothing in /var/crash after the failure.

> The only error I'm able to find in /var/log/messages during boot-time is
> this:

> ---
> Jan 18 11:03:19 tsunami kernel: acpi0: <_ASUS_ Notebook> on motherboard
> Jan 18 11:03:19 tsunami kernel: ACPI Error: [RAMB] Namespace lookup
> failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20110527/psargs-392)
> Jan 18 11:03:19 tsunami kernel: ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND, Could not
> execute arguments for [RAMW] (Region) (20110527/nsinit-380)
> ---

> Not sure if this is the root cause for this, cause I've seen this error
> before and at that time there were no reboots happening (months ago). Also
> I find it strange that it says Notebook above, as this is a desktop
> machine...

> And currently I'm out of ideas. Could you guys give any advice or hints
> what else I could check and sort this out?

> Thanks and regards,
> Marin

> --
> Marin Atanasov Nikolov

I had something like that with FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE amd64 on a Sandy Bridge system, Intel i7.

It started within two days after building and installing FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE.

My remedy, without consulting the emailing lists, was to switch to the STABLE branch.

New computer hardware, needing the updates before the next release, was part of the reason for switching to STABLE.

Now is post-9.1-RELEASE.  Are you still on 9.0-RELEASE?

Tom