> 
> The effect is that almost everything seemingly stops: I cannot get a
> login prompt on the console; I cannot get echo of characters there or
> in active xterm windows; xterm windows don't even receive focus change
> notifications any more (or at least don't show that they've received
> them by changing their cursor colors) -- but the RUN light stays on,
> and the machine answers to ICMP ECHO, so it's not completely dead.
> However, the only thing I can do to it is hit BREAK and reboot.
> 
I have observed similar things myself, but haven't tracked it down yet.

> Is there anything I can do to find out more about this?  I've got DDB
> compiled into the kernel, so if I could get in there, I might be able
> to see something interesting (except that the kernel always reports
> "[netbsd symbol table invalid]" at boot, where on my Sun Sparc I see
If you want the symbol table to be loaded, you must boot with B/40,
otherwise the symtable memory will be left out.

> that, if I could just get it to dump core, I reckon that would be of
>
No, you can't, there are no kernel core dump support in the vax port.

Anyway, I will soon jump into this to look for what may be causing
the problem. I think that is is a process scheduling problem because
that the system will wake up alive again when the big processes are
finisked (at least they have done so for me). I may have missed to
do a correct setting of the AST level somewhere, or something.

-- Ragge