Jukka Marin wrote:

>I have experienced a few freezes running 2.0beta kernels.  A moment ago,
>I was about to save an image from gimp and the system froze.  The X display
>remained visible, but the mouse and keyboard were all dead (no caps lock
>operation even).  I waited for some 15 minutes and the system didn't reboot
>or recover.  All the time, I was able to ping the system from a remote
>machine.
>
>I have seen this before.  I thought it was a disk problem, replaced the
>disk with a new one (different make as well), no help.  Sometimes the
>system freezes for about 10 seconds and then comes back alive, sometimes
>I have to push the reset button to get it going again.
>
>This has been going on for months.  The system is usually stable, but every
>now and then (one or twice a month) it freezes like this.  I think it happens
>during heavy disk / memory load, but I'm not completely sure.
>
>  -jm
>
>
>  
>
I had similar problems, which were attributed to mounting filesytems 
with softdep option. I did a simple test, downloaded a 40MB tar file 
(e.g. mozilla.tar.gz) and then unpacked it many times over and over 
again, sooner or later, the whole system would just freeze. Mounting all 
my filesystems without softdep option made the problem go away. I am not 
a kernel programmer, but from what I can see, softdep code in NetBSD may 
have some serious bugs.