Help needed - Hard lockups and reboots on laptop

[Norberto Meijome]

(Cross posting from -questions - apologies for any duplications caused).

Hi all,
I've been running FBSD 6 on my laptop(hardware and software specs below)
for the last 3 weeks. I have been experiencing spontaneous reboots (NOT
panics, just blip, off it goes to restart), lockups and some app crashes
(mainly Thunderbird, dont think it's related, but might as well mention it).

- Reboots: usually related to using smbfs. If I have a remote share
mounted and I get disconnected, trying to access this share either
completely locks up OR reboots (not all the time, but scarily often).

- Lockups are FAR more common: they seem to happen when I come back from
a resume (about 4 to 6 out of 10 times it locks up), sometimes when I
bring a network interface up or down, trying to shut down from within an
xterm, or from the shutdown/reboot menu in WDM.  My latest one was when
the battery hit 2% and I heard the warning (not sure if it was from apmd
or gkrellm2 battery plugin.... it just went beep...lockup).

- Machine is a Toshiba Tecra A2, 2 x 512 Kingston RAM, 80 GB Seagate
Momentus drive (new, but same problems with a 60GB Seagate drive too).
Have been using this machine with same specs (except a 60 GB Fujitsu
drive) for over a year with Windows XP Pro and had practically no issues
AT ALL.

- I have tried kernel with and without APIC , APM as module or built in
(currently built in). ACPI detects a bunch of stuff but it panics on
resume (the drive doesn't seem to go into sleep and it comes back all
confused  :-)  ). I've posted on this issue before to this list.

- APM seems to be working a bit better after a small hack of mine -
added a wall cmd to the resume...that seems,SO FAR, to prevent the most
common of lockups on resume. toshctl port works quite well.

- Kernel is 6.1-Prerelease from Feb 10th (local time). BIOS is latest
from Toshiba's site (v 1.40) . Changing settings in BIOS (mainly
peripherals managed by OS or BIOS) doesn't make any noticeable difference.

- Attached are my make.conf, rc.conf, /boot/loader.conf.local , current
sysctl.

- I'm using GELI for swap partition and my work data (on a file backed
md device) - but all these problems pre-date use of GELI (though not
presence of GELI in kernel)
- I'm using the latest versions (as per ports) of Xorg, fluxbox-devel,
gkrellm2, samba3 - pkg list attached.

- Despite my preference for FreeBSD, Windows is starting to look like a
better option stability-wise  :(  Is there anything I can do to improve
the stability of this machine?

Any suggestions for compile options? Suggestions for brands / models of
laptops that are KNOWN to work fine with FBSD would be greatly
appreciated too.


TIA!!!
Beto