[nycbug-talk] [OT] FreeBSD 5.4 crashing?

[Matt Juszczak]

> couple issues I would ask before deciding to move to another OS all
> together.  what where your previous production systems running?  are
> you able to roll back to them until you can isolate and resolve your
> issues with 5.x?  did you run into these problems on this hardware
> before rolling them over to production?  you are positive it is not a
> hardware issue?

This is our first setup of FreeBSD 5.4.  We had one FreeBSD machine before 
this "three server setup" which was done at the same time.  All of them 
continue to crash constantly, with kernel traps, but I can't debug because 
they lock up.

The only difference between these three machines and the other FreeBSD 
machine is that these run SMP.  They are also; however, much more high 
trafficked than the other machine, so that could be an issue also (I have 
no idea whether or not flooding the other machine with a bunch of mail 
traffic, etc. would cause it to crash).

I am fairly certain it isn't a hardware issue.  We have replaced the RAM 
with new RAM, and its happening constantly on two different boxes, with 
two different hardware setups completely.  Makes me think it isn't the 
hardware.


> now that the obligatory questions are out of the way :)  so what was
> causing the systems to lock up?  not to doubt your troubleshooting but
> I've seen a fair amount of people switch platforms midstream due to
> hard to pin down problems only to find it is a (mis)configuration
> issue or faulty hardware.

There's no way to tell.  I've been all over the mailing lists, and some 
committers have sent me patches without a backtrace, which makes me think 
they know the general gist of the problem.  Some people think its the 
ttwakeup bug, others think its the way FreeBSD is handling SMP.  Either 
way, I really need a stable solution....