am64/FreeBSD-5.3-STABLE (or RELEASE) crashes often

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 02:52:45PM -0700, Troy Bowman wrote:

> And it doesn't dump its core to its dump swap space, too, so I can't run
> savecore after reboot to get debugging info.  I have the swap space in
> fstab commented out so it won't come up at boot to be able to manually
> harvest the core, as it gives "savecore: no dumps found."  (it doesn't
> happen automatically, either). 

Please double-check that you're running 'dumpon'.  If you don't
configure swap at boot time, it won't be run automatically by the boot
scripts.

> Hardware that it is running on is a Tyan s2875 with dual amd64/246
> processors, and 2 GB Registered DDR RAM (Corsair).  We're also running
> vinum for all of the filesystems, mirroring them all, including the root
> filesystem.  The vinum is using two SATA WD Raptors.  I have one older
> IDE drive plugged in to capture the kernel dumps.  

There's an erratum for vinum in 5.3.

> What can I do to debug this more if I can't harvest the kernel dumps to
> report a bug?

See the chapter on kernel debugging in the developers' handbook,
available on the website.  It takes you through how to configure your
kernel with support for the debugger, and how to obtain minimal
information from it when you encounter a panic.

You might like to first update to FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE in case the bugs
are already fixed.

> Is there anything the FreeBSD team can do?

Perhaps, once you have the above information.  Also report it to the
freebsd-amd64 mailing list.

Kris
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