10.9 Debugging the Deadlocks

You may experience so called deadlocks, the situation where system stops doing useful work. To provide the helpful bug report in this situation, you shall use ddb as described above. Please, include the output of ps and trace for suspected processes in the report.

If possible, consider doing further investigation. Receipt below is especially useful if you suspect deadlock occurs in the VFS layer. Add the options

makeoptions        DEBUG=-g
    options     INVARIANTS
    options     INVARIANT_SUPPORT
    options     WITNESS
    options     DEBUG_LOCKS
    options     DEBUG_VFS_LOCKS
    options     DIAGNOSTIC

to the kernel config. When deadlock occurs, in addition to the output of the ps command, provide information from the show allpcpu, show alllocks, show lockedvnods and show alltrace.

For threaded processes, to obtain meaningful backtraces, use thread thread-id to switch to the thread stack, and do backtrace with where.