My desktop machine still has a lot of problems staying “up” for prolonged periods. As I’m normally running a gnome desktop the problems aren’t normally logged and the kernel panic triggers a triple fauilt, so the machine just hard reboots. This isn’t good and doesn’t allow me to debug what’s wrong with it. 🙁

Debugging via serial isn’t an option as there is no serial interface, but then someone suggested debugging via firewire. Hunting round the web I eventually came across this paper from Greg Lehey that explains a lot about kernel debugging. I’m going to try and play with debugging via firewire to see if I can get more information about the problems, but as I’m trying to debug from i386 against an amd64 I’m not 100% sure it’ll work. While gdb shouldn’t have any issues, the debug kernels I need may well not be usable 🙁

If anyone has more pointers or suggestions then I’m all ears. There really isn’t that much useful information about this stuff around (or if there is I couldn’t find it!).