FreeBSD 6.1 Instability

Greetings,

We have been running FreeBSD on our mail servers for about as long as I can=
=20
remember. Recently, we decided to go SMP to handle increased mail load. Aft=
er=20
assembling the hardware, installing the OS and software, and restoring all =
of=20
our data, we noticed in testing that our first machine began hanging=20
semi-regularly when it began processing lots of mail. Disabling SMP=20
eliminated the hangs completely. We tried it all again on completely=20
different hardware with exactly the same result. Our conclusion: somethings=
's=20
buggy in SMP.

Here are the symptoms. The machine hangs, and becomes completely=20
unresponsive. =A0It looks like a deadlock. =A0It will sometimes respond to =
the=20
power button and shut down (without being able to first sync and unmount=20
filesystems), and sometimes the power button event gets caught in the=20
deadlock. =A0Sinceit's not actually a crash, there is no core dump or other=
=20
debugging information. In the most recent situation, it hung at different=20
points every time I tried to compile ezm3, after successfully compiling oth=
er=20
packages.

We're system administrators, not kernel hackers, so this is a plea for help=
=2E I=20
wouldn't know where to start, but I'm hoping someone can point me in the=20
right direction. We're also willing to give a (trustworthy) FreeBSD develop=
er=20
root access to the test machine since it's just sitting idle right now. If=
=20
you need to crash it, that's fine. We'll have people during normal business=
=20
hours who know how to push a reset button.

Thanks for your time.
=2D-=20
Charles Ulrich
Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com
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