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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.erols.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!feed1.news.erols.com!news From: Ken Bigelow <kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD hangs Date: Sat, 05 Oct 1996 07:28:04 +0000 Organization: Erol's Internet Services Lines: 46 Message-ID: <32560E04.3163@www.play-hookey.com> References: <FRODEF.96Oct1160443@dslab5.cs.uit.no> Reply-To: kbigelow@www.play-hookey.com NNTP-Posting-Host: kenjb05.play-hookey.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win16; U) Frode Vatvedt Fjeld wrote: > > I recently installed the latest FreeBSD snapshot on my PC. In most > respects it works very well, except that sometimes (every few hours) > everything freezes permanently. No message appears on the console. The > reset-button appears to be the only way out. Everyone says FreeBSD is > more stable than Linux (with which I'm more experienced, and this sort > of thing rarely happened), so how come this happens all the time? > > Does anyone have ideas where I should search for the problem? The > snapshot in question is 2.2-960801-SNAP. I also tried briefly the > 2.1.5-RELEASE, and the same thing happened there (I reinstalled > _everything_ with the snapshot). > > I discovered a file /var/crash/minfree once (it held the string > "2048"), but I have no idea what that means. > > Also, the top-3.3 package that came with the snapshot does not work, > it allways coredumps when it tries to print the process-info. > > I compiled my own kernel, and all devices appear to work well. It's an > all SCSI-system (NCR 53C810 on motherboard, no IDE-drivers compiled > in), otherwise it's a very standard PC configuration. I have 48M of > swap, and I'm pretty sure it's not exhausted. The freeze has happened > both under heavy load and no load at all. > > Please help, I can't live with rebooting my computer every two hours! > (I'd install Win95 if I could). > Jump-at-conclusions guess, based on similar irregular behavior in a totally different situation: Check for a possible flaky RAM somewhere. Sometimes RAM can check out perfectly good, but then fail either thermally or when one specific pattern is stored there. We had a hell of a time with it until we swapped SIMMs one at a time to locate the bad one. If you can, swap the whole set of SIMMs on the machine you want to get working, and test the others on a separate setup. In our situation it took several days, because the pattern failure occurred only *after* the bad chip warmed up. Yecch! -- Ken Are you interested in | byte-sized education | http://www.play-hookey.com over the Internet? |