On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, Mike Smith wrote:
> > I have been having a great time :-) debugging a device driver,
> > and have run into a really fun way to panic. With one type
> > of traffic, [something] happens and the kernel drops into
> > DDB, just the way I want.
[snip panic info]
> This is pretty normal; ddb is a little fragile sometimes. You want to go
> back and look at the very first trap; it will probably be different and
> will be the *real* trap. All the rest are just ddb exploding.
Yep. Unfortunately, the original trap led me on a wild goose chase,
trying to figure out why system memory was being overwritten by
received device data. I really suspected something funny in the DMA...
It turns out that the network stack gets really unhappy when you
trim an mbuf chain and leave the last mbuf with a negative length :-(
> > Now looking back at the panic message, it looks like the stack has
> > pushed into the "frame pointer". Is this an actual problem, or
> > just some side effect of the page fault?
> The frame pointer is a pointer into the stack, so no, it's not a problem.
Of course (doh!) I realized that shortly after posting.
> Typically stack overruns lead to double faults (because there's no stack
> on which to handle the fault) and a spontaneous reboot. This just sounds
> like there's something about your first trap that kills DDB (eg. an
> invalid instruction pointer, etc.)
I did check the SP, and it looks like the kernel stack stays in the
"temporary" 8k stack set up in i386/i386/locore.s Does that sound right?
> Hope this helps; let us know if the first trap isn't any more
> illuminating. You might also try using remote gdb instead of ddb.
Thanks. I also had to dig out a couple bugs involving word alignment
when doing DMA transfers, and learned NOT to mess with the data inside
mbufs with external data ;-) I guess I've left enough offerings at
the altar of stupidity, so maybe Loki will leave me alone now.
All the best,
-Richard
-------------------------------------------
Richard Hodges | Matriplex, inc.
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