You may experience so called deadlocks, a situation where a system stops doing useful work. To provide a helpful bug report in this situation, use ddb(4) as described in the previous section. Include the output of ps and trace for suspected processes in the report.

If possible, consider doing further investigation. The recipe below is especially useful if you suspect that a deadlock occurs in the VFS layer. Add these options to the kernel configuration file.

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

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

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