Re: Request for help - my computer 'bought the farm'

[Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com>]

>   I have 48 megabytes..I finally sat down and worked out how to get swap turned
> on (it wasn't a problem with Hurd not recognizing my swap partition, but
> rather a problem with me not editing the boot scripts :-P ) 

Note that you can alse use the `swapon' command at run time without rebooting.

>   This error still happens to me after a while.  In fact, after enabling swap
> I did a dpkg-buildpackage on Guile to see what happened.  It didn't even
> get as far as it had previously before spontaneously rebooting.  I tried
> finishing the build by hand, and in debian/rules binary got messages
> along the lines of: "wait: Computer bought the farm Mach: essential
> server proc died.  Crashing computer.  ...."

Hmm, that sounds like you might be hitting the same filesystem bug that
Marcus has seen when building X.  Or, it might be another bug if proc is
really what's crashing (first).  It's important for us to see all the
console messages to tell what's really going on.  If the boot filesystem
server crashes (which is what Marcus was seeing), then all other manner of
mayhem may ensue and falsely suggest other culprits.  If it is really a
proc server bug crashing just the proc server, that is probably less
difficult to find than the filesystem bug.  


You can try this patch to init to make it sit'n'spin instead of rebooting
Mach for a crash, so you can see all the console messages and write every
one down before hitting the reset button.  (If you are not in a position to
easily recompile your hurd, I can send you an init binary with this patch.)

Index: init.c
===================================================================
RCS file: /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/hurddev/cvsroot/hurd/init/init.c,v
retrieving revision 1.103
diff -u -b -p -r1.103 init.c
--- init.c	1999/03/06 22:17:41	1.103
+++ init.c	1999/05/25 05:33:01
@@ -331,6 +331,8 @@ reboot_system (int flags)
 void
 crash_system (void)
 {
+  printf("spinning...\n");
+  while (1);
   reboot_system (CRASH_FLAGS);
 }