When they segfault, where do they segfault?
-a On 22 June 2014 07:56, O. Hartmann <ohart...@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote: > > Hello. > > I face a strange problem on a set of CURRENT driven boxes. The systems in > question are > all the same version of CURRENT (more or less, a week or so discrepancy). > > The boxes affected have 8 GB of RAM and are old-style Core2Duo systems. > > The phenomenon: > > Starting up the box shows the operating system working. But sometimes it is > impossible to > start certain applications, like Firefox - they segfault. More disturbing is > the fail of > the linker when building world. Sometimes I get strange messages like > > relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_PC32 against symbol `__error' defined > in .text > > when compiling/linking. The funny thing is: rebooting the box and doing > exactly the same > very often leaves the system then operable - starting applications works, > compiling works! > > First I thought this could be a indication of a dying system and so I checked > the memory > for two days non-stop without any indication of anything wrong. The boxes do > not have ECC > RAM - it's Intel. > > I see this problem on two C2D based boxes relatively often (one E8400 two > core, another > Q6600 quadcore, both systems have 8 GB RAM). This phenomenon also occured two > or three > months ago on another machine with 32 GB RAM and a Core-i7 3930K, but it went > away (it was > the very same error as shown above). > > Another system, a i3-3220 with 16 GB RAM never showed the problem although > that system > build world also on a regular basis very frequent as the C2D systems do. > > Well, I feel a bit confused. On the first view, the problem looks weird and > it indicates > a kind of memory problem - but testing the memory didn't show anything wrong. > > Today "windowmaker" stopped starting due to a malformed command in one of > windowmaker's > library. I did reboot the box and everything was all right. Then, also today, > I tried > compiling world and I got a weird error message about a misspelled > "Int__xxx", I can not > remember exactly the text, I rebooted and everything was all right again. > > Those errors are frequent on 8GB, C2D based systems and at the moment not > present any > more on more modern systems with more memory as described above. This could > be a > coincidence, but it is strange anyway. > > I do not exclude dying hardware, but I'd like to ask whether there is > something strange > going on with FreeBSD's memory management at the moment and whether those > problems could > also be triggered by some nasty bug? I never see a crash (which would also > indicated > faulty hardware), I mostly realise those strange behaviour either after a > fresh boot or > after I ran some memory disk i/o intensive jobs, like updating the ports tree. > > By the way, FreeBSD CURRENT suffer from a tremendous performance cut these > days when > compiling world and updating the ports tree and running portmaster. On one > box, on which > ports reside on a UFS partion, it takes more than 8 minutes to pass the > portmaster -da, > which is quick when not compiling world. On another system on which > /usr/ports is > residing on ZFS (the box has 16GB RAM!), it takes sometimes 30(!) minutes to > perform a > "svn update" while compiling world (that is the i3-3220 with 16 GB RAM > system), it takes > 6 - 15 minutes when the box is relaxed and updating the ports tree the first > time (every > subsequent update is much faster). > > Well, I know these reports of mine are a bit weird since I have no exact log > of the > problems, but I think if there is an issue not with the hardware, I report > those in. > > Regards, > > oh _______________________________________________ freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
