[nycbug-talk] OpenBSD, kernel debugger

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

Looking for a little help in resurrecting my OpenBSD firewall.  I sort of 
gave up on it when I couldn't upgrade past 3.3 since everything after that 
either locks up or panics on boot from CD or the hard drive.  So right now 
I've got PFSense running on what was a desktop workstation, but it does so 
many complex things with just a "point-n-click" that I'm not properly 
learning queueing/shaping, tags, anchors and all that other newish stuff.

So the gist of my problem is this...  Something has changed post OpenBSD 
3.3 that has made it not work on the hardware I want to use.  I don't 
think that I can provide any useful info to the OBSD folks without getting 
a core dump and taking a look at where the panic originates.  But I'm 
totally lost as to how to force a dump to disk when the kernel is still 
booting.  Ignoring the rest of the possible problems here (I did give the 
hardware a good once-over, including a 24+ hour memtest86+ run), how do I 
accomplish getting it to dump to disk when it panics with a 3.4 or newer 
kernel booted either off of CD or hard drive?

I've asked this a few times on -misc, but haven't really pulled a good 
answer out of anyone there...  So any clever OBSD lurkers - delurk!

Thanks,

Charles