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

[Steve Gonczi]

Hello, 

Looking at the Hald source: ( usr/src/cmd/hal/hald /hald.c) 

Error 95 is coming from a script, ti is just informing you that a fatal error occurred. 
The informative error code is the "2". 

This tells you that hald forked a child process, and it timed out 
waiting for the child process to write to a pipe. 

The child process hung or failed for some reason, and the parent decided to 
kill it. The child code could hang for a number of reasons. 

One possible way to debug this is load mdb so that it breaks early in the boot, 
set a breakpoints on some of the processing steps, like 
hald_dbus_local_server_init , ospec_init ettc.. and similar processing steps to 
narrow down where it hangs. 

I see from the source that Hald has fairly detailed built-in logging that may help 
debugging this. 

If the environment variables HALD_VERBOSE and HALD_USE_SYSLOG are defined, 
you should get detailed status messages. 
There is probably a man page somewhere on how to set these. 

Said log settings can also be modified via hald command line options 
( Sorry, I have no idea what script or setup file you have to hack to 
specify these on startup): 
static void 210 usage () 211 { 212 fprintf ( stderr , "\n" "usage : hald [--daemon=yes|no] [--verbose=yes|no] [--help]\n" ); 213 fprintf ( stderr , 214 "\n" 215 "        --daemon=yes|no      Become a daemon\n" 216 "        --verbose=yes|no     Print out debug (overrides HALD_VERBOSE)\n" 217 "        --use-syslog         Print out debug messages to syslog instead of stderr.\n" 218 "                             Use this option to get debug messages if HAL runs as\n" 219 "                             daemon.\n" 220 "        --help               Show this information and exit\n" 221 "        --version            Output version information and exit" 222 "\n" 223 "The HAL daemon detects devices present in the system and provides the\n" 224 "org.freedesktop.Hal service through the system-wide message bus provided\n" 225 "by D-BUS.\n" 


Steve 


----- Original Message -----
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: