fatal double fault (spinlock)

[Kris Kennaway]

Duane Hill wrote:
> 
> We have a Dell PowerEdge 6850 with four 3ghz Intel dual core Xeon 
> processors and 12 gig ram. It is running FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE-p15 amd64. 
> SMP has been compiled into the kernel. However, 
> machdep.hyperthreading_allowed has been set to zero(0) in 
> /etc/sysctrl.conf.
> 
> Once about every 1.5 to 2 weeks, the server throws the error:
> 
>   fatal double fault
>   cpuid=15
>   spinlock sched lock held by 0xffffff032f3c1500 > 5 seconds
> 
> This server is located in a colo many miles away. I had to have a person 
> at the colo facility read off the message that was on the screen. I hope 
> it is exact (or at least close).
> 
> This server is one of our main spam filter servers. It use to have an 
> MTA installed on it that required FreeBSD 5.5. That software does not 
> run on the server anymore.
> 
> I've been meaning to upgrade the server to 6.2 release, but have been 
> procrastinating. Would upgrading the server to 6.2 release correct this 
> issue?

Chances are good: by running 5.5 you are missing out on several years of 
bug fixes.

Kris