On Fri, Jan 21, 2000 at 09:30:42PM -0500, Dan Winship wrote:
> For a long time now, my macppc box has been wedging solid every now
> and then. I chalked it up to "port-macppc flakiness". After a while I
> noticed that it only did it when I was doing lots of disk i/o. (Like,
> trying to do a cvs update in one window and a build in another.)
> 
> Now I've just discovered that it doesn't happen under 1.4.2_ALPHA...
> 
> Has anyone else seen this, and if so, what era of current are you
> running? I'd like to try to narrow this down a little before I start
> binary searching between the 1.4 branch and now for the offending
> commit...
> 
> (This is on a Blue G3, 350MHz, 64M RAM.)
> 
> -- Dan

I've seen similar events on my G3 233MHz Desktop (first generation or so G3),
64MB RAM, running MacOS on the IDE disk and NetBSD on an internally mounted
SCSI disk.

The difference in my case is that when the machine dies, it is always about to
open a  new window in X (typically emacs or xterm, the X app may be running
locally or via ssh on another machine). This typically
happens after a few hours or days of uptime and some significant system activities.
In my way of using the machine, this is often after updating the NetBSD sources
when I  want to take a look on what was updated since last time. A few times,
it dies at the first xterm after system start, which is somewhat inconvenient
because a restart with fsck does take its time :-( I've never seen the problems
with non-X applications, e.g. it has not yet died when I was rsync'ing my
NetBSD repository from another system.

When the  problem started several months ago, the machine just hang and had to be
reset, but when I removed support for ddb, it just reboots. Nothing is logged
about the cause in /var/log/messages or other places where I've looked.

- Erik Bertelsen

ps: maybe I should really find the cables and hook up a serial console and use
that with ddb re-enabled.......