The amr driver was not MPSAFE in 5.4 (i think) so you would not have run
into these problems. You should be able to just take the driver from
RELENG_6 and use it on a released branch. If it doesn't compile, let me
know and I'll generate you a tarball or diff that will work. We had
major issues with amr at work until Scott Long and I (mostly Scott)
helped iron out the stability issues with amr. You should either run
RELENG_6 or take the driver from RELENG_6 and use that. You'll get the
added benefit of being able to use the Linux management tools (megarc)
to see the status of your raid.
Matthew Hagerty wrote:
Did these serious race conditions exist in 5.4 also? This is not good
news and it would be nice if there was some place to find out about
what hardware drivers are considered stable for production servers. I
always assumed that this was the function of the supported hardware
page. Is this not the case?
Can I pull just a certain driver from stable and use it with a release
branch (no even sure how I would do that)? Or will there be
dependency problems? I suppose I could run on stable until the driver
is fixed in a release branch, but I need this box up and online, and
I've always read that the stable branch is not the place for
production servers.
Is there any place I read about the status and work being done on the
arm driver?
Thanks,
Matthew
Paul Saab wrote:
There are serious race conditions with amr in 6.0 that can cause
serious hangs. I suggest you take the amr driver from RELENG_6 and
try that.
Matthew Hagerty wrote:
Greetings,
I'm running 6.0-RELEASE-p5 on a Toshiba built server: dual Xeon
Intel motherboard with a LSILogic MegaRAID (amr0) controller. This
machine has been running for about 2 years now, and was very stable
until I updated from 5.3 to 5.4, and now 6.0. The crashing seems to
be totally random and I have had it crash in as little as 12 hours
and as long as 143 days.
When the box goes down it does so in a strange way. First, it still
responds to network probes like ping (usually), however, all console
access is ignored. Also, some network ports still respond, like a
telnet to port 22 to test SSH will yield an SSH banner, but trying
to connect with SSH just hangs. Sometimes this is also true of the
SMTP server, but not always. This also makes it impossible for me
to use CARP to swap to the recently purchased spare machine, since
the network interface is generally still responding so CARP does not
detect a problem.
My biggest problem with this is that there are *never* any console
messages or log entries in any logs, no warnings about disk failure,
buffer exhaustion, system failures, etc.. The machine simply seems
to stop responding and the only way to correct the problem is a hard
reboot.
A strange thing did happen yesterday though, I believe I caught the
box on the verge of failure. I was SSH'd in and did a ps to check
things out. There were about 100 of these entries:
55050 ?? D 0:00.00 postmaster: ipa ipa ::1(63061) startup
(postgres)
The box runs a web-based app and connects to a local Postgres DB
which seemed to be unable to start new connections being requested
by the PHP scripts. At any rate, I stopped Apache and then tried to
stop Postgres which resulted in (or just happened to coincide with)
the box locking up and no longer responding to my SSH commands or
attempts to reconnect with SSH. I hardly think this is a Postgres
problem, but even if it was, a userland app should *not* be able to
bring down a box...
Can anyone shed some light on this, give me some options to try?
What happened to kernel panics and such when there were serious
errors going on? The only glimmer of information I have is that
*one* time there was an error on the console about there not being
any RAID controller available. I did purchase a spare controller
and I'm about to swap it out and see if it helps, but for some
reason I doubt it. If a controller like that was failing, I would
certainly hope to see some serious error messages or panics going on.
I have been running FreeBSD since version 1.01 and have never had a
box so unstable in the last 12 or so years, especially one that is
supposed to be "server" quality instead of the make-shift ones I put
together with desktop hardware. And last, I'm getting sick of my
Linux admin friends telling me "told you so! should have run
Linux...", please give me something to stick in their pie holes!
Thanks,
Matthew
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