On Tue, 8 Aug 2000, Joseph Sarkes wrote:

> I am still occasionally getting a system freeze. It stopped
> happening a while back, and came back the last 4 or 5 days
> ago I think. Has anything changed in that range of time that
> could be causing this? My earlier freezes stopped when the ps
> bug was fixed.

It's looking likely that the ps(1) bug wasn't really fixed the last time
around (see PR kern/10765). Do your current freezes coincide with running
ps(1) or top(1)?

> The gist of this post is a question. Does netbsd support an nmi
> to enter the debugger? I can wire up an nmi button, if it will
> do any good, to find out where the hang is occuring. Is this a
> supported method to get into the kernel debugger?

It depends on the port. Usually when an NMI can be generated on the
platform/cpu, the MD code has a handler which deals with it. If the
debugger is compiled into the kernel, the NMI handler will jump into it.

A couple of people with NMI-capable hardware are already helping to track
down this freezing problem. :-)

Cheers, Steve