[OpenIndiana-discuss] How to troubleshoot failing hardware causing hoot hangs

[Robin Axelsson]

Hi,
I'm about to RMA my motherboard but before that I want to troubleshoot 
the issue further so that I can give more specific information on what's 
failing on the motherboard.

What happens is that some hardware is failing on the motherboard which 
causes OI to hang during boot. So my question is how can I find out what 
hardware is failing? The problem is that when I reset the system it 
boots up just fine after the reset and e.g. the svcs -xv gives no 
information on failures on last boot. These issues also don't happen 
every time I start up the system, it happens rather sporadically.

Here's what I found out; when it freezes, the last lines of the console 
looks like this:
---------------------------------------------
...
pseudo-device: fbt0
fbt0 is /pseudo/fbt at 0
pseudo-device: sdt0
sdt0 is /pseudo/sdt at 0
pseudo-device: fasttrap0
fasttrap0 is /pseudo/fasttrap at 0
pseudo-device: dcpc0
dcpc0 is /pseudo/dcpc at 0
pseudo-device: ucode0
ucode0 is /pseudo/ucode at 0
pseudo-device: nvidia255
nvidia255 is /pseudo/@255
pseudo-device: fct0
fct0 is /pseudo/fct at 0
pseudo-device: stmf0
stmf0 is /pseudo/stmf at 0
pseudo-device: fssnap0
fssnap is /pseudo/fssnap at 0
pseudo-device: winlock0
winlock0 is /pseudo/winlock at 0
pseudo-device: nsmb0
nsmb0 is /pseudo/nsmb at 0
pseudo-device: bpf0
bpf0 is /pseudo/bpf at 0
------------------------------------------------
After about 5-10 minutes, the HAL service fails the following error 
message on the console:

------------------------------------------------
Sep 14 10:38:33 svc.startd[10]: svc:/system/hal:default: Method 
"/lib/svc/method
/svc-hal start" failed with exit status 95.
Sep 14 10:38:33 svc.startd[10]: /system/hal:default failed fatally: 
transitioned
to maintenance (see 'svcs -xv' for details)
------------------------------------------------
HAL seems to be rather generic and I cannot find any information about 
this failure in /var/log/ either. Perhaps the startup sequence reveals 
which "row" in it that is failing. There is no useful information in the 
/etc/dbus-1/system.d/hal.conf and the 
/var/svc/log/system-hal\:default.log has the following entries for the 
failure:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ Sep 14 10:33:50 Enabled. ]
[ Sep 14 10:34:22 Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/svc-hal 
start"). ]
hal failed to start: error 2
[ Sep 14 10:38:33 Method "start" exited with status 95. ]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
which isn't much at all. Grepping for status "95" reveals that HAL has 
failed 5-6 times since the start of this year which is considerably less 
than the number of startup failures I have experienced during this 
period. Perhaps this failure affects different hardware at different 
occasions.

Any help or suggestions are much appreciated
Kind Regards
Robin.