Re: Recent instabilities?

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

>> I recently did a test to upgrade the NetBSD kernel on one of
>> my Mac Minis from 9.99.93 from early January to a more recent
>> 9.99.94 from, oh, two weeks ago?
> 
> I noticed some problems, namely weird crashes in gcc and
> occasional deadlocks. They seem to be gone in .96 as far as I
> can tell (which isn't very far yet, only been torturing the
> quicksilver for an hour, but without issue ) My uneducated
> guess would be fallout from the middle of the membar / locking
> audit.

If so, the fallout has probably not been fully fixed yet. :(

A couple of days ago I "cvs update"d to -current, and built a
9.99.96 kernel.  I booted that on the test machine, and left it
running its nightly jobs, a tcsh session on the console and an
instance of ntpd overnight.

This morning when I came to check on the status.  There were no
scary kernel messages, and I could enter another "ntpq -c pe"
command, but it failed to do anything when I pressed enter.  A
check with Control-T says tcsh is waiting on [uarea], and that
state is of course un-interruptible with control-C.  The host is
still pingable, but of course even though the TCP sessoin for an
ssh session establishes, nothing more happens.  9.99.93 can on
the other hand run for days or weeks without issue.

This spells trouble for the pkgsrc bulk builds for the upcoming
release.

I've never done anything with ddb on this host, and ... since
it's a USB keyboard, I suspect that's going to be difficult(?),
it certainly used to be(?) impossible on the i386/amd64 ports,
and I would be surprised if it's any better here.

Regards,

- Håvard