Subject: Re: sun4m (LX) crashes...
To: Andrew Gillham <gillhaa@ghost.whirlpool.com>
From: Dennis Ferguson <dennis@jnx.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 04/27/1996 13:52:16
> When I run 'make build' on my LX, or just 'make depend' in /usr/src,
> it will eventually panic.  I don't have a trace yet, but the panic
> message looks like: (one of)
> 	panic: pv_unlink
> 	panic: kernel fault
> 	panic: pmap_page_protect !PG_V

I had the same variety of panics occurring regularly on a pair of LXs,
with a kernel which was solid on an IPX.  I also had difficulty finding
anything which would read the core dump.  In fact the ./configure script
in a recent CVS source would provoke the `kernel fault' panic 100% of the
time, but the stack trace disappeared too quickly to get anything from it.

In order to make progress I added an `options   DDB,DEBUG,DIAGNOSTIC' to
the kernel configuration file and built a new kernel.  The CVS ./configure
script ran under this one just fine, as did a kernel build and a bunch of
other stuff, and in fact the machines have now been up for three days, which
exceeds their previous continuously-up records by about 2.5 days.  I am no
closer to knowing what is wrong, but I now have a guess as to why the
developer and anyone doing alpha testing might not have noticed this...

Dennis Ferguson