System crash when running pkg_upgrade

A

atarahas

When i attempt to do a pkg_upgrade -a on my system, the system will often apparently crash and reboot always after i have walked away, and come back and see the system rebooted and and the boot halted with a demand to run fsck manually, indicating the system likely crashed abnormally. I have never before seen the system crash like this and it has happened twice already when running pkg_upgrade. As the pkg_upgrade process takes an hour, i am often not there to see whatever has happened. I have looked into doing a kernel dumpon command to capture some diagnostic information, however it says it needs a device the size of physical memory, which is over 500 MB. Given the kernel is only a few megabytes, is that really necessary if I just want to capture some diagnostic information about what it was doing when it crashed.

Also I have wondered what could cause this. The system is used for other disk intensive activity and i have never before seen this happen. Could it be replacing libraries while the system is running is causing something to screw up?
 
It says in some documentation that after a crash FreeBSD can go directly into the kernel debugger after a crash, if the kernel debugger is installed. This would seem to be a good idea so maybe i can see any error messages that were printed but kgdb is installed and this is not what happens.
 
I have read some more and the minidump hopefully will fit inside the swap partition i have, so configured this way hopefully i can get some information about what causes the crashes if they happen again. i looked at pkg_upgrade log and the last package listed at the time of the crash was scrnsaverproto package the first time it crashed and the tkdesk program the second time, though it may have crashed on the package update that had started after these.
 
pkg_update has finished without any more crashes. Everything seems to be working okay now. Maybe the computer just got hit by a cosmic ray or something.
 
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