Re: crashing issues

[Frank Wille <frank%phoenix.owl.de@localhost>]

On Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:29:59 -0400 (EDT)
Al <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost> wrote:

> >> I hope that there is someone who can help me pin this down. My
> >> Amiga 2000 (blizzard 2060 128MB ram) is crashing about every 2 to
> >> 4 days after upgrading from NetBSD 4 Beta (John Klos's binaries)
> >> to the latest NetBSD 4_stable.
> > [...]
> I don't think it is a kernel panic, it doesn't make it to one. I
> think that it is because it just can't allocate anymore files.
> Although, I should see if I could find a way to see how many file
> descriptors are in use.

"fstat | wc -l" should display the number of opened files in the system
(maybe there is a better method, so please correct me).

When you are running short of file descriptors, you might want to check
"sysctl kern.maxfiles".


> Well, I have the 128MB of physical memory and I have setup 1.5 GB of
> swap. It seems memory related, but I am not sure. How would I know if
> it could not address all of the swap.

Maybe there will be panic like "out of address space"?

The amiga port (and probably many other m68k ports) cannot address more
than 224MB of virtual memory per process (PR9725).


> How would I look at this?

When there is nothing in the logs after a crash it is difficult.

Check the processes which use the most memory with pmap(1) from time to
time, and see if they get close to the limit.


> Is NetBSD 6 where it is ready for production use and does it support
> NFS?

The 6.0 release is near and we didn't drop NFS support. :)


> I have been thinking my next step is to upgrade to 5.1.2, I just
> wanted to know if anyone has done this remotely from 4.0. Will the
> system start ssh after I install the 5.1.2 kernel, but before I have
> 5.1.2 userland installed?

I don't want to give you a guarantee for that, but usually the system
will boot into multiuser when the kernel version is higher and you
didn't remove 4.0-compatibility from it.

I did that several times myself remotely. First update the kernel, reboot,
then stop all processes except your ssh-session and update userland.

-- 
Frank Wille