Re: Spontaneous reboots on 5.99.59/i386 on a Thinkpad X41

[Moritz Wilhelmy <moritz%wzff.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 17:11:12 +0200, Rares Aioanei wrote:
> I got spontaneous reboots because of that on NetBSD and FreeBSD, IIRC. 

That's good news. I'll dump the disk and reinstall, and see if the
problem persists. For me, this means I don't have to fear the worst
right away (broken hardware).

> So yes, that might be the cause. What experiments did you perform 
> exactly? Did you try fsck?

Yes, several times. In fact, the first time I rebooted after
experimenting with fss, it wouldn't even boot but the kernel would panic
and dump. After running fsck several times, sometimes interrupted by
more panics, if I remember correctly, I managed to boot the machine
again. The reboots are fairly new and unexpected behaviour. I have some
kernel crashdumps floating around which I intend to debug.
Note that in case of the reboots I'm talking about, there were no dumps
being created.

The "experiments" I was talking about was merely creating a snapshot in
/tmp, the reboot might have removed it, and that might have been the
source of the problems, but I don't know.. I feel like I'm grasping at
straws.

My original thought behind trying fss(4) in the first place was that
snapshots are a useful function that might make upgrades easier, and
it's a pity that they aren't stable yet, even though they have been
present for quite some time (I remember reading something about NetBSD-2
and "experimental feature" in the manpage).

So, I knew mostly what I was doing and what instabilities to expect,
there is no important data being lost, all I'm looking for is to debug
why this machine started rebooting :-)


Best regards,

        Moritz