5.4/amd64 not stable

[Josef Pojsl]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 12:40:01PM -0500, John Baldwin wrote:
> It can. :)  Can you compile DDB into your kernel to get a stack trace when it 
> panics?  Also, if you have a kernel.debug, you can run gdb on it and do a 
> list of the instruction pointer to get the corresponding file:line.  i.e.:
> 
> # gdb kernel.debug
> gdb> l *0xffffffff80271a83

John,

thank you for the reply.

In the meantime, we were trying hard to simulate the problem
in lab, unfortunately without success. Ultimately, we decided to upgrade
to 6.0/amd64 and put the gear into production. It has been up and running
for 53 hours now, so it is very likely that the problem disappeared
in 6.0. As bosses were getting a bit nervous, we do not plan any further
experiments.

There was one issue on the 6.0 system running in production.
Due to misconfiguration of Apache, a huge number of processes
had opened a huge number of sockets. As a result, the maximum number
of open files was reached (kern.maxfiles). This did not appear
on 5.4, but it should have because it was running the same misconfigured
Apache! Therefore, it _may_ be possible that whenever kern.maxfiles
was reached on 5.4, panic occured. I admit that this is only a weak
suspicion, and I have no direct proofs of it. BTW, kern.maxfiles
is 500000 (yes, half a million).

--
Josef