freebsd stable - Jan 2005 - 5.3-RELEASE crashes during make buildworld (and other problems)

Hi all,

This machine runs 4.11-STABLE just fine.  I can make buildworld all day.
  Before that it ran Win2k for many months with no problems.  For these
reasons, I do not suspect hardware at this point.

When I install 5.3-RELEASE it runs fine until...

When I attempt to cvsup to STABLE and run make buildworld (yes with and
without the -j) it crashes.

I am very bad at kernel debugging because FreeBSD 4 has (almost) always 
been perfectly stable so I have read and re-read the handbook and I am 
trying to get more information to the list.

So far in rc.conf I added:

dumpdev="/dev/ad0s1b"
DUMPDIR="/usr/crash"

Then I
chmod 700 /usr/crash

Then in /boot/loader.conf I added

verbose_loading="YES"
boot_verbose="YES"

Does this look reasonable?

What else should I do?

Meanwhile, I started the make buildworld again (right where it left off)
and I am waiting for it to crash.

You can find the dmesg and anything else I find at
http://rick.updegrove.net/FreeBSD/jan-10-2005/

*UPDATE*
While I was writing this the make buildworld failed and left me some
details which I put into a file named gcc-error-1 file at
http://rick.updegrove.net/FreeBSD/jan-10-2005/gcc-error-1

Then I rebooted and went into X and soon I got
http://rick.updegrove.net/FreeBSD/jan-10-2005/panic_kdeinit.txt

There is nothing in /usr/crash/

I cant find any files name vmcore anywhere.

I noticed that on the new 5.3-RELEASE SYSTEM if I do not have a
half-failed "make buildworld" I can install packages with pkg_add -r
whatever all day long and the machine (and KDE) runs fine.

Thanks,

Rick








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I am wondering if cpu overheating could be a factor. In 4.x you are 
building with gcc 2.95,  whereas 5.3 uses 3.4 - the 3.x compiler takes 
longer and works harder, which may be generating more heat (i.e too much 
heat).

You can test this by installing the cpuburn port and running it for 
10-20 minutes.

regards

Mark


Rick Updegrove wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> This machine runs 4.11-STABLE just fine.  I can make buildworld all day.
>  Before that it ran Win2k for many months with no problems.  For these
> reasons, I do not suspect hardware at this point.
>
> When I install 5.3-RELEASE it runs fine until...
>
> When I attempt to cvsup to STABLE and run make buildworld (yes with and
> without the -j) it crashes.
>
>

Rick Updegrove <rick@updegrove.net> writes:
> This machine runs 4.11-STABLE just fine.  I can make buildworld all day.
>   Before that it ran Win2k for many months with no problems.  For these
> reasons, I do not suspect hardware at this point.
> 
> When I install 5.3-RELEASE it runs fine until...
> 
> When I attempt to cvsup to STABLE and run make buildworld (yes with and
> without the -j) it crashes.
> 
> I am very bad at kernel debugging because FreeBSD 4 has (almost)
> always been perfectly stable so I have read and re-read the handbook
> and I am trying to get more information to the list.
> 
> So far in rc.conf I added:
> 
> dumpdev="/dev/ad0s1b"
> DUMPDIR="/usr/crash"
That should be "dumpdir", not "DUMPDIR".  
The default would be /var/crash instead of /usr/crash.
Also, /dev/ad0s1b has to be bigger than your RAM size.
> Then I
> chmod 700 /usr/crash
> 
> Then in /boot/loader.conf I added
> 
> verbose_loading="YES"
> boot_verbose="YES"
> 
> Does this look reasonable?
Pretty much.
> What else should I do?
You can try to analyze the panic messages themselves.
There is some guidance for this in the FAQ.
> Meanwhile, I started the make buildworld again (right where it left off)
> and I am waiting for it to crash.
> 
> You can find the dmesg and anything else I find at
> http://rick.updegrove.net/FreeBSD/jan-10-2005/
> 
> *UPDATE*
> While I was writing this the make buildworld failed and left me some
> details which I put into a file named gcc-error-1 file at
> http://rick.updegrove.net/FreeBSD/jan-10-2005/gcc-error-1
Hardware problems would be my first suspicion here.
If you try it again, does it fail in the same place?
> Then I rebooted and went into X and soon I got
> http://rick.updegrove.net/FreeBSD/jan-10-2005/panic_kdeinit.txt
> 
> There is nothing in /usr/crash/
> 
> I cant find any files name vmcore anywhere.
> 
> I noticed that on the new 5.3-RELEASE SYSTEM if I do not have a
> half-failed "make buildworld" I can install packages with pkg_add
-r
> whatever all day long and the machine (and KDE) runs fine.
There shouldn't be any relationship between the two...

Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>  I am wondering if cpu overheating could be a factor. In 4.x you are
>  building with gcc 2.95, whereas 5.3 uses 3.4 - the 3.x compiler
>  takes longer and works harder, which may be generating more heat (i.e
>  too much heat).
>
>  You can test this by installing the cpuburn port and running it for
>  10-20 minutes.
Thank you very much for the reply Mark.  I installed cpuburn but ran out 
of time that night to test it.
After some reading, I limited the RAM by adding the following to rc.conf

hw.physmem="512M"                # Limit physical memory. See
loader(8)

Then I rebooted.  I did this because I do not want to wait for 1536M to
be written to disk after the inevitable crash.  Then I ran cpuburn
(actually burnK7) and "top" and monitored them.

*"start paste from top process"

last pid: 56346;  load averages:  1.00,  1.00,  1.13
                              up 0+01:28:13  19:59:17
31 processes:  2 running, 29 sleeping
CPU states: 99.2% user,  0.0% nice,  0.4% system,  0.4% interrupt,  0.0%
idle
Mem: 48M Active, 160M Inact, 69M Wired, 1848K Cache, 60M Buf, 214M Free
Swap: 3047M Total, 3047M Free

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
  607 root     131    0   136K    36K RUN     51:14 98.97% 98.97% burnK7

*"end paste from top process"

As you can see it went on for 51 minutes and my machine did not lock up
and the heat alarm did not go off.  Please note that I ran KDE and
portupgrade during this test with no problems at all.  Also note there is a
160 GIG drive in here that was undergoing a fsck -B which really slows 
down the system a lot.

Thanks again for the reply, but I do not suspect hardware per se.  The
reason I believe this is as I mentioned  this machine runs FreeBSD
4.11-STABLE and/or Win2K (all service packs) just fine.  On windoze I
just beat half-life 2 without ever crashing it.

On FreeBSD 4.11 I run make buildworld every few days without ever
crashing it.

The only thing I can think to do differently is comment
# hw.physmem="512M"                # Limit physical memory. See
loader(8)
and try cpuburn again?  Any other ideas?

Rick

P.S.
After writing all this, I did manage to finally build 5.3-STABLE after a
few more tries at make buildworld, from wherever it failed.  Aside from
one lockup in KDE (no crashdump yet sorry) last night it has been ok
today.  I will however continue to test make buildworld and try to get a 
crashdump to post to the list because I would really like to know
what is really causing this instability.  Thanks again!

Rick Updegrove wrote:
> 
>  PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
>  607 root     131    0   136K    36K RUN     51:14 98.97% 98.97% burnK7
> 
> *"end paste from top process"
> 
> As you can see it went on for 51 minutes and my machine did not lock up
> and the heat alarm did not go off.  Please note that I ran KDE and
> portupgrade during this test with no problems at all.  Also note there is a
> 160 GIG drive in here that was undergoing a fsck -B which really slows 
> down the system a lot.
> 
> Thanks again for the reply, but I do not suspect hardware per se.  The
> reason I believe this is as I mentioned  this machine runs FreeBSD
> 4.11-STABLE and/or Win2K (all service packs) just fine.  On windoze I
> just beat half-life 2 without ever crashing it.
> 
>
98.87% for 51 minutes *should* have triggered any heat problems, so 
looks like the HW is not the problem (worth ruling out anyway).

best wishes

Mark

Rick Updegrove wrote:

When I finally got 5.3-STABLE built after several mysterious failed
attempts the machine basically runs fine until...

I try to "Ctrl + Alt + F1" (or any of the F keys) that will now
consistently locks up the machine.

If I am quick enough with "Ctrl + Alt + Backspace" or
"Ctrl + Alt + Del" (or ssh from another machine) I can at least get it
to reboot without a fsck on startup.  Unfortunately, if I am too slow it 
hangs indefinitely.  I have had to just power it off several times now 
and of course it then complains about / not being unmounted properly 
etc. etc.

Yes, this probably contributes to some of my problems earlier but when I 
was running make buildworld from single user mode it still crashed and 
despite all the help I have gotten here I still have not managed to 
capture a crash dump.

So, I am running 5.3-STABLE (from yesterday) and all my ports/packages 
are up to date and if I forget I cant switch to a terminal while I 
experiment with fluxbox or KDE I will always lock up the machine.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Rick


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