[pca] zpool unavailable after Kernel Patch 142909-17

[Don O'Malley]

Sounds like the kind of problem that DTrace could help to diagnose 
(though you would need to have a good idea of where the problem is to 
start with, so you place your probes in the right area)...

Perhaps there might be something in the DTrace Toolkit could help - see 
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+dtrace/dtracetoolkit

DTrace should allow you to examine your system while it's still 
available (as opposed to forcing the kernel to core dump), though this 
is obviously not the case if it's hung :)

Just a thought...
-Don

Andy Fiddaman wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Oct 2010, Paul B. Henson wrote:
>
> ; On 10/20/2010 7:29 AM, Glen Gunselman wrote:
> ; Sun's x86 machines are definitely a step down from the capabilities of their
> ; SPARC systems, even ones years older. If a problem like this occurred on one
> ; of my SPARC servers, I'd simply break into the prom and force a kernel panic,
> ; resulting in a nice juicy crash dump suitable for forensic analysis. As far as
> ; I can tell, the only way on x86 to make this happen is to initially boot the
> ; system from the kernel debugger, and leave it running under the debugger
> ; indefinitely until the problem occurs 8-/. I'm also still disgusted about the
> ; continued lack of serial console logging support on the ILOM :(.
>
> You can force a panic on x86 via an NMI through an IPMI interface if the
> hardware supports it and you've set the right parameters in /etc/system.
>
> Here's an article on how to do it:
>
> http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1044
>
> Regards,
>
> Andy
>
>