Re: Debugging a hard system wedge
Re: Debugging a hard system wedge
- Subject: Re: Debugging a hard system wedge
- From: Andrew Myrick <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:46:42 -0800
On Dec 10, 2009, at 7:05 PM, Godfrey van der Linden wrote:
> G'day, All.
>
> Really there is no other place to ask this. I mean if you have a hammer (some knowledge of kernel programming) everything looks like a nail.
>
> On my brand new MacBookPro5,3 (2.66Ghz) 10.6.2 system I have been getting unexplained hard wedges. The symptoms:-
>
> - The menu clock seconds counter keeps ticking.
> - The mouse still moves
> - The fans do not spin up.
> - top in terminal stops reporting
> - ssh into the system doesn't work.
> - After a wakeup the login window works to type the password in, but it hangs around with a spinning cog and never logs me in.
> - I suspect that mDNS isn't going either as the machines <name>.local doesn't seem to resolve, though I'm not sure of that.
>
> I haven't attempted to connect to the system with GDB yet as the symptoms feels wrong to me as a kernel hang. I'd like the groups opinion on the utility of showallstacks and other magic kgmacros to track this down.
I'd recommend starting with capturing a few stackshots and looking at what the system's doing. You can enable the stackshot keychord with `sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.stackshot.plist`. Then when the problem reproduces, pressing CMD+OPT+CTRL+SHIFT+<Period> will capture a stackshot.
If you can grab a spindump, that would be even better, but I suspect you can't run command line tools in this state.
> - May be unrelated, the system never, ever goes to idle sleep. I must close the lid or it will happily sit there for hours with the screen off but otherwise running.
It is probably unrelated. Run `sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys` and let the system run for as long as your idle sleep timer is set plus a few minutes. Afterwards, look at the fs_usage log for any processes that are generating disk I/O after your idle timer has expired. Every time the disk is touched, we extend the idle sleep timer for a minute to prevent the system from sleeping during long running, user-initiated tasks like downloading a large file in Safari, but this heuristic also allows poorly written applications to prevent idle sleep altogether.
-Andrew _______________________________________________
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