Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wednesday, June 6, 2012 8:36:04 PM UTC-5, Mark Felder wrote: Hi guys I'm excitedly posting this from my phone. Good news for you guys, bad news for us -- we were building HA storage on vmware for a client and can now replicate the crash on demand. I'll be posting details when I get home to my PC tonight, but this hopefully is enough to replicate the crash for any curious followers: ESXi 5 9 or 9-STABLE HAST 1 cpu is fine 1GB of ram UFS SUJ on HAST device No special loader.conf, sysctl, etc No need for VMWare tools Run Bonnie++ on the HAST device We can get the crash to happen on the first run of bonnie++ right now. I'll post the exact specs and precise command run in the PR. We found an old post from 2004 when we looked up the process state obtained from CTRL+T -- flswai -- which describes the symptoms nearly perfectly. http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2004-02/0250.html Hopefully this gets us closer to a fix... Is this a crash or a hang? Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working with a FreeBSD 9.1RC1 system under VMware ESXi 5.0 with a 64GB UFS root FS and 2TB ZFS filesystem mounted via a virtual LSI SAS interface. Sometimes during heavy I/O load (rsync from other servers) on the ZFS FS, this shows up in /var/log/messages: Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 5 ee 60 16 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 3 ef 42 51 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 3 ef 64 51 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sep 21 02:18:49 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 3 ef 66 51 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:18:49 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:18:49 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy ... Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 41 f3 94 99 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command These have been happening roughly every other day. mpt0 and em0 were sharing int 18, so today I put hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 into /boot/devices.hints and rebooted; now mpt0 is using int 256. I'll see if it helps. Guy ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:00:40 -0500, guy.hel...@gmail.com wrote: Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 5 ee 60 16 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 02:14:55 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 3 ef 42 51 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 02:18:44 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 3 ef 64 51 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 02:18:48 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sep 21 02:18:49 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 3 ef 66 51 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 02:18:49 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 02:18:49 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy ... Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): WRITE(10). CDB: 2a 0 41 f3 94 99 0 1 0 0 Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): CAM status: SCSI Status Error Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): SCSI status: Busy Sep 21 05:06:18 backups kernel: (da1:mpt0:0:1:0): Retrying command Sometimes you'll see this before a crash, but not every time. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday, September 13, 2012 12:14:49 pm Mark Felder wrote: On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:11:28 -0500, Andriy Gapon a...@freebsd.org wrote: Just curious - does VMWare provide a remote debugger support (gdb stub)? I'm not aware of one. What I have been able to successfully do is break into the debugger during the hang but the info I've posted so far has not been relevant to anyone. I'm hoping someone on the core team will eventually be able to follow my guide and figure out what went wrong. So the last e-mail I sent before this week I asked if you could get a crashdump from DDB? The flswai case you pointed to was a lock deadlock, and having a crashdump would be really helpful for figuring out which threads were deadlocked. Barring a crashdump, capturing 'ps' output from DDB would be a good first step (you can sanitize process names if you need to). However, a crashdump that you can use kgdb on will make debugging this significantly easier. -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Fri, 14 Sep 2012 20:37:40 -0500, Mark Saad nones...@longcount.org wrote: How do you have suj on 8.3 ? Are you using a patch ? I don't have suj on 8.3 Also can you retest 9 with the following sysctlkern.timecounter.hardware=Acpi-fast Yes, I'll attempt that as soon as possible. We're under a tight deadline to migrate critical resources off of VMWare now so I don't know how soon I can test. Also in esxi what setup options do you have for the vm's ? I'm not sure what ones I have off the top of my head, but VMWare support has previously poured over ever option to make sure nothing was misconfigured. Lastly do you have esxi setup to talk to a ntp server ? If so can you confirm that it's working ? I mean the esxi host not the vm . Yes, and yes. We've got a reliable NTP infrastructure at work and ESXi is definitely using it. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Sep 15, 2012, at 11:36 AM, Mark Felder f...@feld.me wrote: On Fri, 14 Sep 2012 20:37:40 -0500, Mark Saad nones...@longcount.org wrote: How do you have suj on 8.3 ? Are you using a patch ? I don't have suj on 8.3 I misread the prior emails Also can you retest 9 with the following sysctlkern.timecounter.hardware=Acpi-fast Yes, I'll attempt that as soon as possible. We're under a tight deadline to migrate critical resources off of VMWare now so I don't know how soon I can test. Also in esxi what setup options do you have for the vm's ? I'm not sure what ones I have off the top of my head, but VMWare support has previously poured over ever option to make sure nothing was misconfigured. It's not that I doubt that , in my experience their support is not equipped to answer questions that don't start with in my windows vm I have this issue ... Lastly do you have esxi setup to talk to a ntp server ? If so can you confirm that it's working ? I mean the esxi host not the vm . Yes, and yes. We've got a reliable NTP infrastructure at work and ESXi is definitely using it. Just checking this can cause odd issues . What hardware is the esxi host server ? What are you using for the vm disks? Is the storage pool on local disks , iscsi , fiber channel , or nfs . --- Mark saad | mark.s...@longcount.org ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hi Mark, Here's the output of our VMs running on ESXi 4.1u1 FreeBSD 7.4: # sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-100) # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe FreeBSD 8.3: # sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-100) # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe FreeBSD 9.0: # sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(1000) i8254(0) ACPI-fast(900) dummy(-100) # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: TSC Note that both 8.3 and 9.0 crash, while 7.4 does not. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Sep 14, 2012, at 8:48 AM, Mark Felder f...@feld.me wrote: Hi Mark, Here's the output of our VMs running on ESXi 4.1u1 FreeBSD 7.4: # sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-100) # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe FreeBSD 8.3: # sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(800) ACPI-safe(850) i8254(0) dummy(-100) # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: ACPI-safe FreeBSD 9.0: # sysctl kern.timecounter.choice kern.timecounter.choice: TSC(1000) i8254(0) ACPI-fast(900) dummy(-100) # sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware kern.timecounter.hardware: TSC Note that both 8.3 and 9.0 crash, while 7.4 does not. How do you have suj on 8.3 ? Are you using a patch ? Also can you retest 9 with the following sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=Acpi-fast Also in esxi what setup options do you have for the vm's ? Lastly do you have esxi setup to talk to a ntp server ? If so can you confirm that it's working ? I mean the esxi host not the vm . --- Mark saad | mark.s...@longcount.org ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:20:26 -0500, John Baldwin j...@freebsd.org wrote: Are you still seeing this, and if so can you get a crashdump? Also, I'm curious if you only see this with SUJ or if plain UFS+SU works fine? The crash on demand right now is producable on 8.x and 9.x, so SUJ isn't a requirement. Also, there is no crashdump available. The OS just hangs and stops taking input. There's no panic or coredump or anything of the like. You just have to nuke the VM and re-boot it back up. And for the record we can't reproduce this crash in Xen... ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
on 13/09/2012 17:50 Mark Felder said the following: On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:20:26 -0500, John Baldwin j...@freebsd.org wrote: Are you still seeing this, and if so can you get a crashdump? Also, I'm curious if you only see this with SUJ or if plain UFS+SU works fine? The crash on demand right now is producable on 8.x and 9.x, so SUJ isn't a requirement. Also, there is no crashdump available. The OS just hangs and stops taking input. There's no panic or coredump or anything of the like. You just have to nuke the VM and re-boot it back up. And for the record we can't reproduce this crash in Xen... Just curious - does VMWare provide a remote debugger support (gdb stub)? -- Andriy Gapon ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:11:28 -0500, Andriy Gapon a...@freebsd.org wrote: Just curious - does VMWare provide a remote debugger support (gdb stub)? I'm not aware of one. What I have been able to successfully do is break into the debugger during the hang but the info I've posted so far has not been relevant to anyone. I'm hoping someone on the core team will eventually be able to follow my guide and figure out what went wrong. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 11:14:49AM -0500, Mark Felder wrote: On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:11:28 -0500, Andriy Gapon a...@freebsd.org wrote: Just curious - does VMWare provide a remote debugger support (gdb stub)? I'm not aware of one. What I have been able to successfully do is break into the debugger during the hang but the info I've posted so far has not been relevant to anyone. I'm hoping someone on the core team will eventually be able to follow my guide and figure out what went wrong. Isn't this what you want? http://stackframe.blogspot.com/2007/04/debugging-linux-kernels-with.html -Kurt ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:28:15 -0500, Kurt Lidl l...@pix.net wrote: Isn't this what you want? http://stackframe.blogspot.com/2007/04/debugging-linux-kernels-with.html -Kurt Interesting -- it looks like that's an option on ESX as well. The only question is: what do I do with that? It's going to give me the debugging entire VM, not the kernel inside. Without being a VMWare developer I imagine its data will be a bit useless :-( ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
on 13/09/2012 22:57 Mark Felder said the following: On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:28:15 -0500, Kurt Lidl l...@pix.net wrote: Isn't this what you want? http://stackframe.blogspot.com/2007/04/debugging-linux-kernels-with.html -Kurt Interesting -- it looks like that's an option on ESX as well. The only question is: what do I do with that? It's going to give me the debugging entire VM, not the kernel inside. Without being a VMWare developer I imagine its data will be a bit useless :-( No, gdb stub is for debugging what is running inside the VM. E.g. look here for an example of how to do that with qemu: http://andriygapon.wikispaces.com/QemuSetup VMWare with gdb stub enabled should not be any different. -- Andriy Gapon ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
--- On Sep 13, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Andriy Gapon a...@freebsd.org wrote: on 13/09/2012 22:57 Mark Felder said the following: On Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:28:15 -0500, Kurt Lidl l...@pix.net wrote: Isn't this what you want? http://stackframe.blogspot.com/2007/04/debugging-linux-kernels-with.html -Kurt Interesting -- it looks like that's an option on ESX as well. The only question is: what do I do with that? It's going to give me the debugging entire VM, not the kernel inside. Without being a VMWare developer I imagine its data will be a bit useless :-( No, gdb stub is for debugging what is running inside the VM. E.g. look here for an example of how to do that with qemu: http://andriygapon.wikispaces.com/QemuSetup VMWare with gdb stub enabled should not be any different. -- Andriy Gapon _ Mark did you try changing the time counter choice sysctl from hpet to Acpi-safe/fast or tsc ? In esx 4.1 an newer using hpet timers causes issues for bsd and linux vms in some cases . The sysctl is kern.timecounter.choice . This sounds like another VMware issues I have seen and read about . See this post http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-32104.html --- Mark saad | mark.s...@longcount.org ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Changing timer source has not been tested. It doesn't crash in 7.x, so did something timer related change in 8.x? ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
--- On Sep 13, 2012, at 7:45 PM, Mark Felder f...@feld.me wrote: Changing timer source has not been tested. It doesn't crash in 7.x, so did something timer related change in 8.x? Mark Yes the time counter choice priority changed , in 8 favoring higher precision hardware like hpet over acpi-fast/safe . I am not sure why or when thus was done; or if this is a side effect of another change. Interestingly centos/rhel/suse has made similar changes and VMware has odd issues with them as well. Can you boot up a 7 environment and get us the value sysctl kern.timecounter . Then get that from an a 8 and 9 environment . Then if the 7 environment uses a different time counter can you try using that value on your crashing setup and report back what the result is . --- Mark saad | mark.s...@longcount.org ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wednesday, June 06, 2012 9:34:02 pm Mark Felder wrote: Hi guys I'm excitedly posting this from my phone. Good news for you guys, bad news for us -- we were building HA storage on vmware for a client and can now replicate the crash on demand. I'll be posting details when I get home to my PC tonight, but this hopefully is enough to replicate the crash for any curious followers: ESXi 5 9 or 9-STABLE HAST 1 cpu is fine 1GB of ram UFS SUJ on HAST device No special loader.conf, sysctl, etc No need for VMWare tools Run Bonnie++ on the HAST device We can get the crash to happen on the first run of bonnie++ right now. I'll post the exact specs and precise command run in the PR. We found an old post from 2004 when we looked up the process state obtained from CTRL+T -- flswai -- which describes the symptoms nearly perfectly. http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2004-02/0250.html Hopefully this gets us closer to a fix... Sorry, I just now saw this. :( Are you still seeing this, and if so can you get a crashdump? Also, I'm curious if you only see this with SUJ or if plain UFS+SU works fine? -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hi guys I'm excitedly posting this from my phone. Good news for you guys, bad news for us -- we were building HA storage on vmware for a client and can now replicate the crash on demand. I'll be posting details when I get home to my PC tonight, but this hopefully is enough to replicate the crash for any curious followers: ESXi 5 9 or 9-STABLE HAST 1 cpu is fine 1GB of ram UFS SUJ on HAST device No special loader.conf, sysctl, etc No need for VMWare tools Run Bonnie++ on the HAST device We can get the crash to happen on the first run of bonnie++ right now. I'll post the exact specs and precise command run in the PR. We found an old post from 2004 when we looked up the process state obtained from CTRL+T -- flswai -- which describes the symptoms nearly perfectly. http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/stable/2004-02/0250.html Hopefully this gets us closer to a fix... ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 3:56:02 pm Mark Felder wrote: On Wed, 30 May 2012 12:17:07 -0500, John Baldwin j...@freebsd.org wrote: Humm, can you test it with 2 CPUs? We primarily only run with 1 CPU. We have seen it crash on multiple CPU VMs. Also, Dane Foster appeared to have been using multiple CPUs in his video transcoding VMs. Unfortunately I can't give you more information at the moment. I'm working with Dane to compile easy to follow steps that recreate this failure. I have not been successful in getting this to crash on demand in my environment, but Dane has so we're trying to recreate his. Ok. It would be really helpful if we could get a crashdump, though I realize that may not be doable. Otherwise, full DDB ps output from a hang would be a good start. Primarily I would want to see what the system is doing and why it isn't running the threads on the run queue. It might also be useful to add KTR_SCHED tracing so we can get the output of that via 'show ktr' from DDB when it hangs. -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
So when this hang happens, there never is a real panic. It just sits in a state which I describe as like being in a deadlock. How would I go about getting a crashdump if it never panics? Is it possible to do the dump over a network or something because I don't believe it can write through the controller at all. Also, thank you for the KTR_SCHED tip. This is the type of info I was looking for. Unfortunately I've only ever seen this crash once on a kernel with debugging enabled. The machine which is currently prepared to do this work used to crash a few times a week and now it has 70 days uptime... however, it is an example of a machine with mpt0 and em0 sharing an IRQ so I might be able to trigger it using Dane's method. $ vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 392 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq14: ata0 34 0 irq18: em0 mpt0 1189748491218 cpu0: timer 2174263198400 Total 3364012124619 I'm doing my best to get you guys the info you need, but this is one heck of a Heisenbug... ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday, May 31, 2012 11:11:11 am Mark Felder wrote: So when this hang happens, there never is a real panic. It just sits in a state which I describe as like being in a deadlock. How would I go about getting a crashdump if it never panics? Is it possible to do the dump over a network or something because I don't believe it can write through the controller at all. You can break into ddb and run 'call doadump'. It should use polled IO, so there is a slight chance of it working. Also, thank you for the KTR_SCHED tip. This is the type of info I was looking for. Unfortunately I've only ever seen this crash once on a kernel with debugging enabled. The machine which is currently prepared to do this work used to crash a few times a week and now it has 70 days uptime... however, it is an example of a machine with mpt0 and em0 sharing an IRQ so I might be able to trigger it using Dane's method. $ vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 392 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq14: ata0 34 0 irq18: em0 mpt0 1189748491218 cpu0: timer 2174263198400 Total 3364012124619 I'm doing my best to get you guys the info you need, but this is one heck of a Heisenbug... Thanks. -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday, May 24, 2012 9:47:46 am Mark Felder wrote: On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:30:40 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Hi, can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above information in it so we don't lose it? I'd be glad to post a PR and assist in helping to get it permanently fixed. I certainly don't want this data to get lost and honestly our business uses FreeBSD on VMWare so much that we really need a permanent fix as much as anyone else :-) The reason I've hesitated to post a PR so far is that I didn't have any truly useful or concrete evidence of where the problem lies. After Dane Foster contacted me and told me he could recreate the crash on demand with his workload it was easier to narrow things down. The suggestion that it was an interrupts issue (by possibly Bjoern Zeeb?) and Dane's discovery that his crashes ceased when em0 and mpt0 share an IRQ, but em0 is completely unused was starting to prove there is some strong evidence here in favor of the interrupts issue. Dane, what's the status on your end? Has your fix still been successful? Is it also stable if you simply set hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 ? Hmm, so the set of ps output you have from DDB shows a lot of runnable processes and swi6 (Giant taskq) as the only running thread (all consistent with your hang). (And that is from your Ctrl-Alt-Esc) Do you only have one CPU in this VM? If not, do you know which threads the other CPUs were running (e.g. do you have ps7.png, etc.)? -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wed, 30 May 2012 10:06:13 -0500, John Baldwin j...@freebsd.org wrote: Do you only have one CPU in this VM? If not, do you know which threads the other CPUs were running (e.g. do you have ps7.png, etc.)? correct, only one CPU in the VM ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 12:07:50 pm Mark Felder wrote: On Wed, 30 May 2012 10:06:13 -0500, John Baldwin j...@freebsd.org wrote: Do you only have one CPU in this VM? If not, do you know which threads the other CPUs were running (e.g. do you have ps7.png, etc.)? correct, only one CPU in the VM Humm, can you test it with 2 CPUs? -- John Baldwin ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wed, 30 May 2012 12:17:07 -0500, John Baldwin j...@freebsd.org wrote: Humm, can you test it with 2 CPUs? We primarily only run with 1 CPU. We have seen it crash on multiple CPU VMs. Also, Dane Foster appeared to have been using multiple CPUs in his video transcoding VMs. Unfortunately I can't give you more information at the moment. I'm working with Dane to compile easy to follow steps that recreate this failure. I have not been successful in getting this to crash on demand in my environment, but Dane has so we're trying to recreate his. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:30:40 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Hi, can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above information in it so we don't lose it? I'd be glad to post a PR and assist in helping to get it permanently fixed. I certainly don't want this data to get lost and honestly our business uses FreeBSD on VMWare so much that we really need a permanent fix as much as anyone else :-) The reason I've hesitated to post a PR so far is that I didn't have any truly useful or concrete evidence of where the problem lies. After Dane Foster contacted me and told me he could recreate the crash on demand with his workload it was easier to narrow things down. The suggestion that it was an interrupts issue (by possibly Bjoern Zeeb?) and Dane's discovery that his crashes ceased when em0 and mpt0 share an IRQ, but em0 is completely unused was starting to prove there is some strong evidence here in favor of the interrupts issue. Dane, what's the status on your end? Has your fix still been successful? Is it also stable if you simply set hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 ? Thanks! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hey all, On 25/05/2012, at 1:47 AM, Mark Felder wrote: On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:30:40 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Hi, can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above information in it so we don't lose it? I'd be glad to post a PR and assist in helping to get it permanently fixed. I certainly don't want this data to get lost and honestly our business uses FreeBSD on VMWare so much that we really need a permanent fix as much as anyone else :-) The reason I've hesitated to post a PR so far is that I didn't have any truly useful or concrete evidence of where the problem lies. After Dane Foster contacted me and told me he could recreate the crash on demand with his workload it was easier to narrow things down. The suggestion that it was an interrupts issue (by possibly Bjoern Zeeb?) and Dane's discovery that his crashes ceased when em0 and mpt0 share an IRQ, but em0 is completely unused was starting to prove there is some strong evidence here in favor of the interrupts issue. Dane, what's the status on your end? Has your fix still been successful? Is it also stable if you simply set hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 ? The situation I've got that's stable now is: hw.pci.enable_msi=0 hw.pci.enable_msix=0 in /boot/loader.conf and: samael:~:% vmstat -i [ 6:31PM] interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 6 0 irq18: em0 mpt0 3061100 15 irq19: em1 6891706 35 cpu0: timer166383735868 cpu1: timer166382123868 cpu3: timer166382123868 cpu2: timer166382121868 Total 675482914 3525 Not using em0. This works for 8 (FreeBSD samael.slush.ca 8.3-STABLE FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE #1: Mon May 7 11:51:03 NZST 2012 r...@samael.slush.ca:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DENE amd64). Neither of those settings on their own seem to stop it from happening. The 9 box I've tried this on still hangs almost every time i run handbrake, no matter whether MSI/MSIX is enabled, or I have separate IRQs for mpt0 and em0/1 I can cause the hang mostly on demand, but not quite sure what information to provide from the hung system. If somebody can let me know what they need, including root access, I can make that happen. Cheers, Dane Thanks! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 24. May 2012, at 13:47 , Mark Felder wrote: On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:30:40 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Hi, can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above information in it so we don't lose it? I'd be glad to post a PR and assist in helping to get it permanently fixed. I certainly don't want this data to get lost and honestly our business uses FreeBSD on VMWare so much that we really need a permanent fix as much as anyone else :-) The reason I've hesitated to post a PR so far is that I didn't have any truly useful or concrete evidence of where the problem lies. After Dane Foster contacted me and told me he could recreate the crash on demand with his workload it was easier to narrow things down. The suggestion that it was an interrupts issue (by possibly Bjoern Zeeb?) Just for the public archives. Interrupts wasn't me. I might have mentioned disabling cdrom and fdc as good as possible but everything else I cannot remember... and Dane's discovery that his crashes ceased when em0 and mpt0 share an IRQ, but em0 is completely unused was starting to prove there is some strong evidence here in favor of the interrupts issue. Dane, what's the status on your end? Has your fix still been successful? Is it also stable if you simply set hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 ? -- Bjoern A. Zeeb You have to have visions! It does not matter how good you are. It matters what good you do! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hi, You guys now absolutely, positively have enough information for a PR. It's still not clear whether it's a device/interrupt layer issue in FreeBSD, or whether vmware is doing something wrong with how it implements shared interrupts, or a bit of both.. Adrian On 24 May 2012 13:54, dane foster d...@ilovedene.com wrote: Hey all, On 25/05/2012, at 1:47 AM, Mark Felder wrote: On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:30:40 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: Hi, can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above information in it so we don't lose it? I'd be glad to post a PR and assist in helping to get it permanently fixed. I certainly don't want this data to get lost and honestly our business uses FreeBSD on VMWare so much that we really need a permanent fix as much as anyone else :-) The reason I've hesitated to post a PR so far is that I didn't have any truly useful or concrete evidence of where the problem lies. After Dane Foster contacted me and told me he could recreate the crash on demand with his workload it was easier to narrow things down. The suggestion that it was an interrupts issue (by possibly Bjoern Zeeb?) and Dane's discovery that his crashes ceased when em0 and mpt0 share an IRQ, but em0 is completely unused was starting to prove there is some strong evidence here in favor of the interrupts issue. Dane, what's the status on your end? Has your fix still been successful? Is it also stable if you simply set hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 ? The situation I've got that's stable now is: hw.pci.enable_msi=0 hw.pci.enable_msix=0 in /boot/loader.conf and: samael:~:% vmstat -i [ 6:31PM] interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 6 0 irq18: em0 mpt0 3061100 15 irq19: em1 6891706 35 cpu0: timer 166383735 868 cpu1: timer 166382123 868 cpu3: timer 166382123 868 cpu2: timer 166382121 868 Total 675482914 3525 Not using em0. This works for 8 (FreeBSD samael.slush.ca 8.3-STABLE FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE #1: Mon May 7 11:51:03 NZST 2012 r...@samael.slush.ca:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DENE amd64). Neither of those settings on their own seem to stop it from happening. The 9 box I've tried this on still hangs almost every time i run handbrake, no matter whether MSI/MSIX is enabled, or I have separate IRQs for mpt0 and em0/1 I can cause the hang mostly on demand, but not quite sure what information to provide from the hung system. If somebody can let me know what they need, including root access, I can make that happen. Cheers, Dane Thanks! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hi, can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above information in it so we don't lose it? If this is indeed the problem then I really think we should root cause why the driver and/or interrupt handling code is getting angry with the shared interrupt. I'd also appreciate it if you and the other people who can reproduce this could work with the em/mpt driver people and root cause why this is going. I think having FreeBSD on vmware work stable out of the box without these kinds of tweaks is the way to go - who knows what else is lurking here.. I'm very very glad you've persisted with this and if I had them, I'd send you a FreeBSD persistent bug reporter! t-shirt. Thanks, Adrian ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
OK guys I've been talking with another user who can recreate this crash and the last bit of information we've learned seems to be leaning towards interrupts/IRQ issues like someone (bz@ perhaps?) suggested. I'm still trying to test this myself, but the other user was able to recreate my crash pretty much on demand. The fix was to not use the first NIC in the VM because it will always share an IRQ with mpt0. Once mpt0 is on its own the crash does not seem to be reproducible anymore. Before: $ vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 378 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq15: ata1 34 0 irq16: em1687237 1 irq18: em0 mpt0319094024539 cpu0: timer236770821400 Total 556552503940 After: $ vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 38 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq15: ata1 34 0 irq16: em1 2811 15 irq17: em2 5 0 cpu0: timer71013398 irq256: mpt0 12163 68 Total 86073483 Is there any other way we can make mpt0 get its own dedicated IRQ without having to do this? The problem is that it causes us to have to make rc.conf changes, pf.conf changes, and who knows what other software could be on these machines that is trying to bind to a specific NIC... Thanks! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On May 21, 2012, at 12:41 PM, Mark Felder wrote: OK guys I've been talking with another user who can recreate this crash and the last bit of information we've learned seems to be leaning towards interrupts/IRQ issues like someone (bz@ perhaps?) suggested. I'm still trying to test this myself, but the other user was able to recreate my crash pretty much on demand. The fix was to not use the first NIC in the VM because it will always share an IRQ with mpt0. Once mpt0 is on its own the crash does not seem to be reproducible anymore. Before: $ vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 378 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq15: ata1 34 0 irq16: em1687237 1 irq18: em0 mpt0319094024539 cpu0: timer236770821400 Total 556552503940 After: $ vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 38 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq15: ata1 34 0 irq16: em1 2811 15 irq17: em2 5 0 cpu0: timer71013398 irq256: mpt0 12163 68 Total 86073483 Is there any other way we can make mpt0 get its own dedicated IRQ without having to do this? The problem is that it causes us to have to make rc.conf changes, pf.conf changes, and who knows what other software could be on these machines that is trying to bind to a specific NIC... Thanks! You could try switching mpt to MSI. MSI interrupts are never shared. Add this to /boot/device.hints: hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 -Andrew -- Andrew Boyerabo...@averesystems.com ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Mon, 21 May 2012 12:01:19 -0500, Andrew Boyer abo...@averesystems.com wrote: You could try switching mpt to MSI. MSI interrupts are never shared. Add this to /boot/device.hints: hint.mpt.0.msi_enable=1 Currently implementing this on the known crashy servers. I've been looking around and all of our VM's that do NOT crash also do not share interrupts between em0/mpt0. Thank you very much if this is the fix we will be SO grateful. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Quick update: I have received word last night that this crash has been consistently happening to someone on FreeBSD 9 and they're looking for more ideas. I changed the following 41 days ago: - Video memory to auto if it wasn't already - SCSI controller changed from LSI Logic Parallel to LSI Logic SAS It uses the same driver (da) but so far has been holding steady for us. As far as the video memory -- many of our servers somehow had video memory set to 1MB which seemed strange; newer builds of FreeBSD on ESXi do not show this option. Perhaps there was a build of ESXi in the past that had a different setting for video memory when you selected FreeBSD? Another change people might want to do as suggested to us by VMWare Support: - Change CPU/MMU Virtualization to the bottom option -- Use Intel VTx/AMD-V for instruction set virtualization and Intel EPT / AMD RVI for MMU virtualization Supposedly there are autodetection issues here with some OSes -- they named some BSDs and Netware. I'll provide further updates if anything changes, but this seems to be working well so far. We won't begin to trust it until we can hit at least 100 days of uptime, though. Unfortunately I was hoping to upgrade these servers to 8.3 before then... ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Guys, The crash on my machine with debugging has evaded me for a few days. I'm still looking for further suggestions of things I should grab from the DDB when it happens again. Thanks for the help everyone! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 4/2/2012 3:59 PM, Joe Greco wrote: On 4/2/2012 11:43 AM, Joe Greco wrote: As a user, you can't win. If you don't report a problem, you get criticized. If you report a problem but can't figure out how to reproduce it, you get criticized. If you can reproduce it but you don't submit a workaround, you get criticized. If you submit a workaround but you don't submit a patch, you get criticized. If you submit a patch but it's not in the preferred format, you get criticized. I'm still not sure what you're taking as criticism. Nothing I've said was intended that way, nor should it be read that way. If you feel that you've been criticized by others in the manner you describe, you should probably take it up with them on an individual basis. It certainly seemed to me that As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. was an unwarranted criticism for reasons that I've already explained. Everything in that paragraph is a fact. If you feel criticized when people state facts, I'm not sure how much I can help you. Please note, I didn't say, You're an idiot for running old stuff. I even explicitly stated that I understood *why* the OP is running an old version. Nevertheless, the facts are what they are. The only way we can deal rationally with the world is to acknowledge reality and deal with it. Wishing it were otherwise isn't really useful. :) Or perhaps this: And since you can't reliably reproduce the problem, how do you expect us to? I understand that these sorts of bugs are difficult/annoying, etc. Been there, done that. Which would appear to be suggesting that either (or possibly both): 1) The reporter has a duty to be able to reliably reproduce the problem prior to reporting, and/or 2) That there was some unreasonable expectation on the reporter's part that you were expected to reproduce it. Quite the contrary, I was responding to your implication that there is some other answer that we should be able to give the OP, other than Try a newer version. Various people have chimed in on the thread, all have offered suggestions, none of which (AFAICS) have helped. I continue to maintain that the best course of action for the OP would be to try the latest 8-stable. And BTW, there are (at least) 2 reasons for that. First, the bug may actually be fixed. But second, we're in the middle of a release cycle for 8.3 right now. If the bug persists in the latest code it will be easier to get the right eyes onto the problem. That benefits both the OP and the community at large. Doug ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 03/30/2012 07:41, Joe Greco wrote: On 3/29/2012 7:01 AM, Joe Greco wrote: On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote: FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. Doug So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then. That isn't what I said at all, sorry if I wasn't clear. The OP mentioned 9.0-RELEASE, and in the context of his message (which I snipped) he mentioned 8-stable. That's what I was referring to. And since both the poster and I made it clear that this doesn't seem to be a case of it fails reliably on a machine of your choosing, just installing random other versions and hoping that it's going to cause a fail ... well, let's just say that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Or at least it's a recipe for a hell of a lot of busywork, busywork not guaranteed to return any sort of useful result. And since you can't reliably reproduce the problem, how do you expect us to? I understand that these sorts of bugs are difficult/annoying, etc. Been there, done that. In the meantime, it's unrealistic to tell people to use supported releases, to wait fifteen months between releases, and then to criticize people complaining about problems with a supported release for using old code. Just to be clear, I didn't criticize anyone. And I share your frustration with the length of the 8.3 release cycle. I really wish I had a better answer, but as much as you and I may wish that things were different, Try a newer version is the best answer we have atm. Doug -- This .signature sanitized for your protection ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 03/30/2012 07:41, Joe Greco wrote: On 3/29/2012 7:01 AM, Joe Greco wrote: On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote: FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. Doug So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then. That isn't what I said at all, sorry if I wasn't clear. The OP mentioned 9.0-RELEASE, and in the context of his message (which I snipped) he mentioned 8-stable. That's what I was referring to. And since both the poster and I made it clear that this doesn't seem to be a case of it fails reliably on a machine of your choosing, just installing random other versions and hoping that it's going to cause a fail ... well, let's just say that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Or at least it's a recipe for a hell of a lot of busywork, busywork not guaranteed to return any sort of useful result. And since you can't reliably reproduce the problem, how do you expect us to? I understand that these sorts of bugs are difficult/annoying, etc. Been there, done that. Nobody expected you to. We're trying to figure out any commonalities that might exist; these may serve to help shed light on where the problem lies. The interesting thing is that I took it and looked at it and came to a conclusion that might have been wrong, though I think the trail of reasoning I used was itself reasonable, given my exceedingly small (one example of problem) sample size. Mark's able to actually *reproduce* the problem on separate installs and with circumstances that are at least somewhat different than what my theory involved, though it is not quite possible to rule out some sort of corruption. Since I have to *assume* that many sites run some sort of FreeBSD on their VMware gear, given that VMware actually lists it as a supported version and VMware generally does things for profit, I am still kind of of the opinion that this is some sort of corruption bug, one that I triggered inadvertently, but one that Mark's environment reproduces rather more frequently. That just seems so unlikely, but more unlikely things have come to pass, so I'm holding onto it as my working theory ;-) I still plan to try to recover my broken VM from backups at some point if time permits. But in short, to answer your question: I don't *care* if you can reproduce the problem. As a user, you can't win. If you don't report a problem, you get criticized. If you report a problem but can't figure out how to reproduce it, you get criticized. If you can reproduce it but you don't submit a workaround, you get criticized. If you submit a workaround but you don't submit a patch, you get criticized. If you submit a patch but it's not in the preferred format, you get criticized. Hm. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 4/2/2012 11:43 AM, Joe Greco wrote: As a user, you can't win. If you don't report a problem, you get criticized. If you report a problem but can't figure out how to reproduce it, you get criticized. If you can reproduce it but you don't submit a workaround, you get criticized. If you submit a workaround but you don't submit a patch, you get criticized. If you submit a patch but it's not in the preferred format, you get criticized. I'm still not sure what you're taking as criticism. Nothing I've said was intended that way, nor should it be read that way. If you feel that you've been criticized by others in the manner you describe, you should probably take it up with them on an individual basis. My experience of FreeBSD as a community is that we tend to be both less critical of users, and less tolerant of it. Especially when compared to other communities that I've interacted with. Doug -- This .signature sanitized for your protection ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 4/2/2012 11:43 AM, Joe Greco wrote: As a user, you can't win. If you don't report a problem, you get criticized. If you report a problem but can't figure out how to reproduce it, you get criticized. If you can reproduce it but you don't submit a workaround, you get criticized. If you submit a workaround but you don't submit a patch, you get criticized. If you submit a patch but it's not in the preferred format, you get criticized. I'm still not sure what you're taking as criticism. Nothing I've said was intended that way, nor should it be read that way. If you feel that you've been criticized by others in the manner you describe, you should probably take it up with them on an individual basis. It certainly seemed to me that As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. was an unwarranted criticism for reasons that I've already explained. Or perhaps this: And since you can't reliably reproduce the problem, how do you expect us to? I understand that these sorts of bugs are difficult/annoying, etc. Been there, done that. Which would appear to be suggesting that either (or possibly both): 1) The reporter has a duty to be able to reliably reproduce the problem prior to reporting, and/or 2) That there was some unreasonable expectation on the reporter's part that you were expected to reproduce it. I consider 1) to be ridiculous, as long as the reporter is reasonably willing to work to resolve the issue, that should certainly be good enough, and he's certainly been interactive enough to _my_ comments, and 2) seems to be nowhere in sight in the reporter's comments, but is nonetheless present in your response. Please respect Reply-to. Thanks. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 19:49:54 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: There's no guarantee that upgarding a VM or rebooting it won't change the config of said VM. Don't forget to diff the vm config file.. I'm not sure how this would be accomplished Am I supposed to be running backup software (rsync, etc?) on my ESX nodes now so I can capture these VM config files? How would I ever know what changed the VM files when? I'm sure if I called up VMWare and said HEY YOU GUYS YOU BROKE THIS BY CHANGING THESE FILES and then when they asked how I figured it out I told them I installed software that is definitely unsupported on their ESXi server to track it that they would certainly tell me to go pound sand. Working in a black box environment is never fun. :( ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 3/29/2012 7:01 AM, Joe Greco wrote: On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote: FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. Doug So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then. That isn't what I said at all, sorry if I wasn't clear. The OP mentioned 9.0-RELEASE, and in the context of his message (which I snipped) he mentioned 8-stable. That's what I was referring to. And since both the poster and I made it clear that this doesn't seem to be a case of it fails reliably on a machine of your choosing, just installing random other versions and hoping that it's going to cause a fail ... well, let's just say that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Or at least it's a recipe for a hell of a lot of busywork, busywork not guaranteed to return any sort of useful result. What you suggest is a fine solution for My ASUS Sempron box fails when I do X! -- in such a case, Try a different version of FreeBSD makes lots of sense. The problem is, in a virtualization environment, theoretically the virtual hosts are all the same sort of hardware (modulo any specific configuration changes of course), so when someone presents a problem that afflicts only a percentage of their VM's, it is important to keep in mind that you are not interacting with physical hardware, and that reinstalling an OS on a problem VM...? Well, let's just say I like real hardware better for many reasons. In the meantime, it's unrealistic to tell people to use supported releases, to wait fifteen months between releases, and then to criticize people complaining about problems with a supported release for using old code. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:27:31 -0500, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: It also doesn't explain the experience here, where one VM basically crapped out but only after a migration - and then stayed crapped out. It would be interesting to hear about your datastore, how busy it is, what technology, whether you're using thin, etc. I just have this real strong feeling that it's some sort of corruption with the vmfs3 and thin provisioned disk format, but it'd be interesting to know if that's totally off-track. We've ruled out SAN, but we haven't ruled out VMFS. Even FreeBSD Guests on standalone ESXi servers with no SAN exhibit this crash. For the record, we only use thick provisioning and if it was corruption I'm not sure what layer the corruption could be at. The crashy servers show no abnormalities when I run either `freebsd-update IPS` or `pkg_libchk` to confirm checksums of all installed programs. Now the other data on there... it's not exactly verified, but our backups via rsnapshot seem to prove there is no issue there or we'd have lots of new files each run. Crud, there goes part of my theory :-) Have you migrated these hosts, or were they installed in-place and never moved? fwiw the apparent integrity of things on the VM is consistent with our experience too. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:44:47 -0500, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: Have you migrated these hosts, or were they installed in-place and never moved? fwiw the apparent integrity of things on the VM is consistent with our experience too. VMMotion and StorageVMMotion does not seem to affect the stability. Even deleting the VM, rebuilding from scratch, re-installing all packages from scratch, copying over a few configs and then copying in any other data (perhaps website data) does not solve the problem. However, our two most notorious for crashing happen to be webservers. We moved one to hardware. We simply rsync'd the exact data (entire OS and files) off the VM onto hardware, made a few config changes (fstab, network interface) and it's been running for 4+ months now with zero crashes. I don't think it's corruption :/ ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 09:44:47 -0500, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: Have you migrated these hosts, or were they installed in-place and never moved? fwiw the apparent integrity of things on the VM is consistent with our experience too. VMMotion and StorageVMMotion does not seem to affect the stability. Even deleting the VM, rebuilding from scratch, re-installing all packages from scratch, copying over a few configs and then copying in any other data (perhaps website data) does not solve the problem. On the same vmdk files? Deleting the VM makes it sound like not. However, our two most notorious for crashing happen to be webservers. We moved one to hardware. We simply rsync'd the exact data (entire OS and files) off the VM onto hardware, made a few config changes (fstab, network interface) and it's been running for 4+ months now with zero crashes. That part doesn't shock me at all. I don't think it's corruption :/ Then it is hard to see what it is. From my perspective: We had a perfectly functional, nearly zero-traffic VM, since Jabber traffic averages no more than a few messages per hour. It was working for quite some time. We moved it from a local datastore to an iSCSI datastore that ended up getting periodically crushed by the load (in particular during the periodic daily load imposed by a bunch of VM's all running at once). At this point, this one VM started hanging on I/O. We expected that this would clear up upon return to a host with a local datastore. It did not. This ended up as a broken VM, one that would hang up overnite, maybe not every night, but several times a week at least. But wait: None of the other VM's, even the VM's that had been abused in this horribly insensitive manner of being placed on intolerably slow iSCSI, developed this condition. There are dozens of other VM's running on these hosts, alongside the one that was exhibiting this behaviour. The VM continued to exhibit this behaviour even after having been moved onto a different ESXi platform and architecture (Opteron-Xeon). For the problem to follow the VM in this manner, and afflict *only* the one VM, strongly suggests that it is something that is contained within the VM files that constitute this VM. That is consistent with the observation that the problem arose at a point where the VM is known to have had all those files moved from one location to a dodgy location. That's why I believe the evidence points to corruption of some sort. Of course, your case makes this all interesting. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:53:10 -0500, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: On the same vmdk files? Deleting the VM makes it sound like not. Fresh new VMDK files every time, and always thick provisioned. None of the other VM's, even the VM's that had been abused in this horribly insensitive manner of being placed on intolerably slow iSCSI, developed this condition. We've seen similar results. Baffling how VMs you know are worse off never develop this condition. There are dozens of other VM's running on these hosts, alongside the one that was exhibiting this behaviour. The VM continued to exhibit this behaviour even after having been moved onto a different ESXi platform and architecture (Opteron-Xeon). For the problem to follow the VM in this manner, and afflict *only* the one VM, strongly suggests that it is something that is contained within the VM files that constitute this VM. That is consistent with the observation that the problem arose at a point where the VM is known to have had all those files moved from one location to a dodgy location. We were hoping that was the explanation as well, but rebuilding the VM entirely from scratch on a new host and seeing the crash come back was a big blow to morale. :( That's why I believe the evidence points to corruption of some sort. Of course, your case makes this all interesting. For the last year I've been convinced it's something hidden inside ESXi's I/O virtualization layer that happens to trigger on only certain VMs. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Mark Felder wrote: On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:24:30 -0500, je...@seibercom.net wrote: I just started reading this tread, but I am wondering if I missed something here. What does this have to do with Windows 7? I emailed him off-list but I'm guessing he thought this was on VMWare Workstation or another product that would virtualize FreeBSD on top of Windows as the host OS. ___ Correct...My bad. jim ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Subsequent inspection suggested that it was happening during the periodic daily, though we never managed to get it to happen by manually forcing periodic daily, so that's only a theory. Perhaps due to a bunch of VMs all running periodic daily at the same time? We had a perfectly functional, nearly zero-traffic VM, since Jabber traffic averages no more than a few messages per hour. It was working for quite some time. We moved it from a local datastore to an iSCSI datastore that ended up getting periodically crushed by the load (in particular during the periodic daily load imposed by a bunch of VM's all running at once). At this point, this one VM started hanging on I/O. We expected that this would clear up upon return to a host with a local datastore. It did not. This ended up as a broken VM, one that would hang up overnite, maybe not every night, but several times a week at least. ... For the problem to follow the VM in this manner, and afflict *only* the one VM, strongly suggests that it is something that is contained within the VM files that constitute this VM. That is consistent with the observation that the problem arose at a point where the VM is known to have had all those files moved from one location to a dodgy location. That's why I believe the evidence points to corruption of some sort. Compare a backup of the VM before it broke to a backup of the same VM after it broke. Hopefully the haystack of insignificant differences isn't too large, or the significant difference needle might be a lot of fun to find. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
There's no guarantee that upgarding a VM or rebooting it won't change the config of said VM. Don't forget to diff the vm config file.. Adrian ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote: FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. Doug ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:31:38 -0500, Adrian Chadd adr...@freebsd.org wrote: * have you filed a PR? No * is the crash easily reproducable? Unfortunately not. It's totally random. Some servers will get the bug and crash daily, some will crash weekly, some might seem to be fine but 3 months later hit this crash. * are you able to boot some ramdisk-only FreeBSD-8.2 images (eg create a ramdisk image using nanobsd?) and do some stress testing inside that? That's a plan I'd like to execute but my free time for building that environment is rather short at the moment :( I'm not that cluey on ESXi, but there may be some PIC/APIC/ACPI change between 7.x and 8.0 which has caused this to surface. Was there a setting to revert ACPI behavior from 8.x to 7.x? I thought I read about that at one point or perhaps this was something available back in the dev cycle when 8 was -CURRENT. *shrug* I know 9.0 and onward has even more ACPI changes so assuming it truly is an ACPI bug I guess we could cross our fingers and hope that the bug has mysteriously vanished? ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:36:49 -0500, Doug Barton do...@freebsd.org wrote: As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. The sad part is that VMWare's supported FreeBSD versions are a joke, and we've been trying to keep VMWare happy by only running supported versions. I honestly don't think they even test. It's so stupid. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Alright, new data. It happened to crash about 10 minutes after I came in this morning and I ran some stuff in the DDB. I have no idea what information is useful, but perhaps someone will see something out of the ordinary? http://feld.me/freebsd/esx_crash/ Thanks... ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hi, * have you filed a PR? * is the crash easily reproducable? * are you able to boot some ramdisk-only FreeBSD-8.2 images (eg create a ramdisk image using nanobsd?) and do some stress testing inside that? It sounds like you've established it's a storage issue, or at least interrupt handling for storage issue. So I'd definitely try the ramdisk-only boot and thrash it using lighttpd/httperf or something. If that survives fine, I'd look at trying to establish whether there's something wrong in the disk driver(s) freebsd is using. I'm not that cluey on ESXi, but there may be some PIC/APIC/ACPI change between 7.x and 8.0 which has caused this to surface. We've seen this. Or something that seems really like it. We run dozens of FreeBSD VM's, many of which are 8.mumble. We have a scripted build environment dating back many years, so generally servers come out in a fairly reproducible form. After several months of smooth running, we had need to shuffle some things around, and migrated some servers to a different datastore. Suddenly, one particular VM, our corp Jabber server, started randomly disconnecting people every morning. Some inspection showed that the machine was running, but disk I/O in the VM was freezing up. Subsequent inspection suggested that it was happening during the periodic daily, though we never managed to get it to happen by manually forcing periodic daily, so that's only a theory. Given that several times it appeared that one of the find commands was running, I was guessing that something in the thin provisioned disk image for the system had gone bad, but reading the entire disk with dd didn't cause a hang, running the periodic daily by hand didn't cause a hang, etc. Migrating the VM to a different host and datastore did not fix the issue. Migrating the VM from an Opteron to a Xeon host with all the latest ESXi 4 patches also didn't make any difference. Migrating the disk image from thin to full seemed to fix it, but I only gave it a day or two, then decided there were other good reasons to reload the VM, so I nuked the VM, which, of course, fixed it. In the meantime, a dozen other similar VM's alongside it run just fine. My conclusion was that it was something specific that had gone awry in the virtual machine, probably in the disk image, but I could not identify it without significant digging that I had no particular reason or inclination to do; since it appeared to be a VMware problem, the reload it and be done with it seemed the quickest path to resolution. That having been said, if anyone has any brilliant ideas about what would constitute useful further steps to isolate this, I can look at recovering the faulty VM from backup and seeing if it still exhibits the problem. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday 29 March 2012 15:42:42 Joe Greco wrote: Hi, Do both 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD crash? --HPS ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote: FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. Doug So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then. If you'll kindly go over to http://www.freebsd.org and look under Latest Releases, please note that 8.2 is a production release. If you don't want it to be a production release, then find a way to make it so, but please don't snipe at people who are using the code that the FreeBSD project has indicated is a current production offering. There are many good reasons not to run arbitrary snapshots on your production gear. It's unrealistic to expect people to run non- RELEASE non-production code on their production gear. We can have that discussion if you don't understand that, drop me a note off- list and I'll be happy to explain it. Otherwise, you've told him to run a newer version, of which NONE IS AVAILABLE, unless you're thinking 9.0, but FreeBSD has a rather catastrophic history of point zero releases, and most clueful admins won't run those in production without carefully measuring the risks and benefits. So you've basically told him to run a newer version without any such version being realistically available. WTF? You want people not to use releases that came out over a year ago? The generally sensible solution to that is to release RELEASEs more than once every fourteen or fifteen months. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 09:58:16 -0500, Hans Petter Selasky hsela...@c2i.net wrote: Do both 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD crash? Correct, we see both i386 and amd64 flavors crash in the same way. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
At 16:03 29/03/2012, you wrote: Alright, new data. It happened to crash about 10 minutes after I came in this morning and I ran some stuff in the DDB. I have no idea what information is useful, but perhaps someone will see something out of the ordinary? http://feld.me/freebsd/esx_crash/ Don't know about ESXi but on others VM Managers i can change the chipset emulation from ICH10 to ICH4. Can you change it to an older chipset too? Thanks... ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday 29 March 2012 15:42:42 Joe Greco wrote: Hi, Do both 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD crash? We've only seen it happen on one virtual machine. That was a 32-bit version. And it's not so much a crash as it is a disk I/O hang. The fact that it was happening regularly to that one VM, while a bunch of other similar VM's were running alongside it without any incident, along with the problem moving with the VM as it is moved from host to host and from Opteron to Xeon, strongly points at something being wrong with the VM itself. Our systems are built mostly by script; I rebuilt the VM a few months ago and the problem vanished. The rebuilt system should have been virtually identical to the original. I never actually compared them though. My working theory was that something bad had happened to the VM during a migration from one datastore to another. We have a really slow-writing iSCSI server that it had been migrated onto for a little bit, which was where the problem first appeared, I believe. At first I thought it was the nightly cron jobs just exceeding the iSCSI server's capacity to cope, so we migrated the VM onto a host with local datastores, and it remained broken thereafter. So my conclusion was that it seemed likely that somehow VMware's thin provisioned disk image had gotten fouled up, and under some unknown use case, it could be teased into locking up further I/O on the VM. I wasn't able to prove it. I tried a read-dd of the entire disk - passed, flying. I tried several things to duplicate the nightly periodic tasks where it seemed so prone to locking up. They all ran fine. But if I left the machine run, it'd do it again eventually. I explained it at the time to one of my VMware friends: But here's where it gets weird. Three times, now, one VM - our Jabber server - has gone wonky in the wee early AM hours. Disk I/O on the VM just locks up. You can type at the console until it does I/O, so you can put in root at the login: prompt but never get a pw prompt. My systems all run top from /etc/ttys and I can see that a whole bunch of processes are stopped in getblk. It's like the iSCSI disk has gone away, except it hasn't, since the other VM's are all happily churning away, on the same datastore, on the same VMware host. http://www.sol.net/tmp/freebsd/freebsd-esxi-lockup.gif Now it's *possible* that the problem actually happens after the 3AM cron run (note slight CPU/memory drop) but the Jabber implosion actually happens around 0530, see drop in memory%. But the root problem at the VM level seems to be that disk I/O has frozen. I can't tell for sure when that happens. All three instances are similar to this. I can't explain this or figure out how to debug it. Since it's locked up right now, thought I'd ping you for ideas before resetting it. Now that was actually before we migrated it back to local datastore, but when we did, the problem remained, suggesting that whatever has happened to the VM, it is contained within the VM's vmdk or other files. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday 29 March 2012 17:49:30 Joe Greco wrote: On Thursday 29 March 2012 15:42:42 Joe Greco wrote: Hi, Do both 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD crash? We've only seen it happen on one virtual machine. That was a 32-bit version. And it's not so much a crash as it is a disk I/O hang. It almost sounds like the lost interrupt issue I've seen with USB EHCI devices, though disk I/O should have a retry timeout? What does wmstat -i output? --HPS ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:31:24 -0500, Eduardo Morras nec...@retena.com wrote: Don't know about ESXi but on others VM Managers i can change the chipset emulation from ICH10 to ICH4. Can you change it to an older chipset too? Unfortunately there's no setting in the GUI for that but I'll keep looking to see if there's a hidden option -- perhaps in the VM's config file. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:55:36 -0500, Hans Petter Selasky hsela...@c2i.net wrote: It almost sounds like the lost interrupt issue I've seen with USB EHCI devices, though disk I/O should have a retry timeout? What does wmstat -i output? --HPS Here's a server that has a week uptime and is due for a crash any hour now: root@server:/# vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 34 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq15: ata1 34 0 irq16: em1778061 1 irq17: mpt0 19217711 31 irq18: em0 283674769460 cpu0: timer246571507400 Total 550242125892 ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:49:30 -0500, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: I explained it at the time to one of my VMware friends: This is 100% identical to what we see, Joe! And we're so unlucky that we have this happen on probably a dozen servers, but a handful are the really bad ones. We've rebuilt them from scratch many times with no improvement. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
This sounds just like a race condition that happens under Windows 7 on this laptop. The race condition, as far as I can tell involves heavy disk access and heavy network access, and usually leaves the drive light on, while all activity monitors (alldisk, allcpu, allnetwork) are still active, although on this laptop disk takes priority, and network slows to a crawl. occasionally, the mouse will stop working, along with everything else, but usually not. keyboard is lower priority, and doesn't do anything. You might want to check with mickeysoft, this might just be their problem. This sounds so freaking similar to the issue I get, and I think it's a race condition (shared interrupts??). This laptop is a Compaq Presario C300 series, with the 945GM chipset and a T7600 Core2 Duo CPU, with 3G of RAM. Mark Felder wrote: Alright guys, I'm at the end of my rope here. For those that haven't seen my previous emails here's the (not so) quick breakdown: Overview: FreeBSD ?? - 7.4 never crash FreeBSD 8.0 - 8.2 crashes FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested (Sorry, not possible in our production at this time, and we were hoping we could base some stuff on 8.3 for long term stability...) ESXi: Confirmed ESXi 4.0 - 5.0 has this problem. Haven't tested on others. History: Over the course of the last 2 years we've been banging our heads on the wall. VMWare is done debugging this. They claim it's not a VMWare issue. They can't identify what the heck happens. We had a glimmer of hope with ESXi 5.0 fixing it because we never saw any crashes in the handful of deployments, but our dreams were crushed today -- two days before an outage to begin migration to ESXi 5.0 -- when a customer's ESXi 5.0 server and FreeBSD 8.2 guest crashed. Crash Details: The keyboard/mouse usually stops responding for input on the console; normally we can't type in a username or password. However, we can switch VTs. If there's a shell on the console and we can type, we can only run things in memory. Any time we try to access the disk it will hang indefinitely. The server still has network access. We can ping it without issue. SSH of course kicks you out because it can't do any I/O. If we were to serve a lightweight http server off a memory backed filesystem I'm confident it would run just fine as long as it wasn't logging or anything. On ESXi you see that there is a CPU spike of 100% that goes on indefinitely. No idea what the FreeBSD OS itself thinks it is doing because we can't run top during the crash. This crash can affect a server and happen multiple times a week. It can also not show up for 180 days or more. But it does happen. The server can be 100% idle and crash. We have servers that do more I/O than the ones that crash could ever attempt to do and these don't crash at all. Completely inexplicable. Things we've looked into: Nothing about the installed software matters. We've tried cross referencing the crashed servers by the programs they run but the base OS is the only common denominator due to the wide variety of servers it has affected. Storage doesn't matter. We've tried different iSCSI SANs, we've tried different switches, we've tried local datastores on the ESXi servers themselves. HP servers, Dell servers -- doesn't seem to matter either. (All with latest firmwares, BIOSes, etc) VMWare gave us a ton of debugging tasks, and we've given them gigabytes of debugging info and data; they can't find anything. VMWare tools -- with, without, using open-vm-tools makes no difference. I think we've done a fair job ruling out VMWare. I think we've finally found enough data that this is definitely something in the FreeBSD world. I'm going to begin prepping some of the known crashy servers with more debugging. Any suggestions on what I should build the kernel with? They never do a proper panic, but I definitely want to at least *try* to get into the debugger the next time it crashes. And when it crashes, what the heck should I be running? I've never played with the KDB before... Thank you for any suggestions and help you can give me ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Mark Felder f...@feld.me wrote: On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:55:36 -0500, Hans Petter Selasky hsela...@c2i.net wrote: It almost sounds like the lost interrupt issue I've seen with USB EHCI devices, though disk I/O should have a retry timeout? What does wmstat -i output? --HPS Here's a server that has a week uptime and is due for a crash any hour now: root@server:/# vmstat -i interrupt total rate irq1: atkbd0 34 0 irq6: fdc0 9 0 irq15: ata1 34 0 irq16: em1778061 1 irq17: mpt0 19217711 31 irq18: em0 283674769460 cpu0: timer246571507400 Total 550242125892 Not so long ago, VMware implemented a clever scheme for reducing the overhead of virtualized interrupts that must be delivered by at least some (if not all) of their emulated storage controllers: http://static.usenix.org/events/atc11/tech/techAbstracts.html#Ahmad Perhaps, there is a bad interaction between this scheme and FreeBSD's mpt driver. Alan ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 03/29/2012 07:03, Mark Felder wrote: Alright, new data. It happened to crash about 10 minutes after I came in this morning and I ran some stuff in the DDB. I have no idea what information is useful, but perhaps someone will see something out of the ordinary? http://feld.me/freebsd/esx_crash/ If this is an interrupt problem with disk i/o, then you might want to look into (DDB(4)) show intr show intrcount maybe show allrman -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk90lloACgkQrDN5kXnx8yaCZACbBamQksNyWC26PUsOn5N9LJLV ql0AoJwYCFDfXhCpZIN735V9qg0VepFf =fCLN -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:05:30 -0500, Mark Atkinson atkin...@gmail.com wrote: If this is an interrupt problem with disk i/o, then you might want to look into (DDB(4)) show intr show intrcount maybe show allrman Thank you! I really don't know what things we should be running in DDB to diagnose this and we will try this upon the next crash. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:24:30 -0500, je...@seibercom.net wrote: I just started reading this tread, but I am wondering if I missed something here. What does this have to do with Windows 7? I emailed him off-list but I'm guessing he thought this was on VMWare Workstation or another product that would virtualize FreeBSD on top of Windows as the host OS. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:53:02 -0500, Alan Cox alan.l@gmail.com wrote: Not so long ago, VMware implemented a clever scheme for reducing the overhead of virtualized interrupts that must be delivered by at least some (if not all) of their emulated storage controllers: http://static.usenix.org/events/atc11/tech/techAbstracts.html#Ahmad Perhaps, there is a bad interaction between this scheme and FreeBSD's mpt driver. Alan If we assume mpt is the culprit how can I go about diagnosing this more accurately? Is there something I should be looking for in vmstat -i? Too many interrupts? Not enough? Rate too high or too low? Or is this something that is much harder to track down because we're dealing with emulated hardware? If any BSD devs are interested in access to our environment I think we could comply. I might even be able to get authorization to give you an account on the most crash-prone server which doesn't have any sensitive customer data on it. I think at this point we'd even be willing to pay someone to look at a server in this state just so we (and hopefully others) can benefit and hopefully we end up with a more reliable FreeBSD-on-VMWare for everyone. I know Doug mentioned running newer OS versions and that is definitely tempting but because it's not 100% reproducible on demand it's hard to prove it fixes it without waiting 6 months. We're fighting internally here with trust 9.0 fixes it vs jump back to 7.4 because we KNOW it doesn't happen there. Having someone look at this and say oh, yes, that's a deficiency in mpt that appears to be fixed in the newer driver that was MFC'd to 8-STABLE and you'll find in 8.3-RELEASE and 9.0-RELEASE would be more comforting. Thanks to everyone for their time on this! ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thursday 29 March 2012 17:49:30 Joe Greco wrote: On Thursday 29 March 2012 15:42:42 Joe Greco wrote: Hi, Do both 32- and 64-bit versions of FreeBSD crash? We've only seen it happen on one virtual machine. That was a 32-bit version. And it's not so much a crash as it is a disk I/O hang. It almost sounds like the lost interrupt issue I've seen with USB EHCI devices, though disk I/O should have a retry timeout? That doesn't seem to fit. Why would a perfectly functional VM suddenly develop this problem when given a slow underlying datastore (fits so far) but then the problem *remains* when returned to a fast local datastore, even on a different host and architecture? And why wouldn't the other VM's running alongside develop the same problem? What does wmstat -i output? No idea, we reloaded the VM months ago. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
FreeBSD ?? - 7.4 never crash FreeBSD 8.0 - 8.2 crashes Obvious short term workaround is to run production on 7.4 (assuming you can) until you figure out what is wrong with 8.x. What filesystem(s) are you running? UFS? ZFS? other? started randomly disconnecting people every morning Due to timeouts? Something might be keeping interrupts disabled too long. there were other good reasons to reload the VM, so I nuked the VM, which, of course, fixed it. I can look at recovering the faulty VM from backup Sounds like corruption. Can you compare the bad VM against a good one? If you find corruption, the question then becomes what is causing the corruption? Sounds like the same thing is getting corrupted every time, rather than something at random. Sounds like the corruption is causing a deadlock in something common, like the buffer cache, or filesystem, or... Is it possible to have root be a ramdisk? This might give you access to the utilities, depending on where the problem is. I have vague memories that the sticky bit used to lock a program in memory, but sticky(8) indicates that this is no longer the case. Is there a way to lock a program in memory? (So that it will be available when the system can't do disk i/o.) If not, you could keep some windows open with things like top and systat -vmstat running. Some of the utilities have options to look at a disk file rather than the live system, if you can get a core dump (swap to NFS?). ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:53:49 -0500, Dieter BSD dieter...@engineer.com wrote: FreeBSD ?? - 7.4 never crash FreeBSD 8.0 - 8.2 crashes Obvious short term workaround is to run production on 7.4 (assuming you can) until you figure out what is wrong with 8.x. We're moving our most critical servers to 7.4 this weekend. After finally seeing the crash on ESXi 5.0 we have run out of viable options and we haven't had time to test FreeBSD 9.0 or 8.3 pre-release code. What filesystem(s) are you running? UFS? ZFS? other? Only UFS. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Mark Felder f...@feld.me wrote: If we assume mpt is the culprit Doesn't VMWare offer different types of emulated disk controllers? If so, that might be the easiest way to narrow the field. Another thing maybe to try would be to backport the mpt Also, it's not VMWare's place to claim not our problem when you are paying for support. If this doesn't happen on bare metal, it's a VMWare issue, or they need to demonstrate it's not their issue. At least that would be the expectation I have. There is also a comment on this post indicating someone else with the issue and who has received unofficial vmware feedback. http://www.hailang.me/tech/virtual/freebsd-vmware-esx-a-weird-error-with-san-storage/ And then there is this one with similar symptoms and a workaround: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=27899 -- Adam Vande More ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:53:52 -0500, Adam Vande More amvandem...@gmail.com wrote: Doesn't VMWare offer different types of emulated disk controllers? If so, that might be the easiest way to narrow the field. Another thing maybe to try would be to backport the mpt Yes, they offer Paravirtual (not applicable for FreeBSD), LSI Parallel (default option), LSI SAS, and Buslogic (not available for 64bit). Both LSI SAS and LSI Parallel use the mpt driver. Also, it's not VMWare's place to claim not our problem when you are paying for support. If this doesn't happen on bare metal, it's a VMWare issue, or they need to demonstrate it's not their issue. At least that would be the expectation I have. You're right, but we've thrown a ton of money at their support and had direct phone access to their engineers. The best we can get out of them is no indication this is a VMWare problem. It's easy for them to blow people off when they're as big as they've grown to be. There is also a comment on this post indicating someone else with the issue and who has received unofficial vmware feedback. http://www.hailang.me/tech/virtual/freebsd-vmware-esx-a-weird-error-with-san-storage/ I found that post ages ago and that's me, mf, as the only person to comment on it. Unfortunately our problem does not align with what he's describing. And then there is this one with similar symptoms and a workaround: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=27899 I'm now investigating those loader.conf options. I have my crashy machine set to use them on next boot so we'll see if it crashes now that I'm using LSI SAS emulated controller. If it still crashes, we'll see what happens after that with those loader.conf options enabled. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On 3/29/2012 7:01 AM, Joe Greco wrote: On 3/28/2012 1:59 PM, Mark Felder wrote: FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 8.3, and 9.0 are untested As much as I'm sensitive to your production requirements, realistically it's not likely that you'll get a helpful result without testing a newer version. 8.2 came out over a year ago, many many things have changed since then. Doug So you're saying that he should have been using 8.3-RELEASE, then. That isn't what I said at all, sorry if I wasn't clear. The OP mentioned 9.0-RELEASE, and in the context of his message (which I snipped) he mentioned 8-stable. That's what I was referring to. If you'll kindly go over to http://www.freebsd.org and look under Latest Releases, please note that 8.2 is a production release. If you don't want it to be a production release, then find a way to make it so, but please don't snipe at people who are using the code that the FreeBSD project has indicated is a current production offering. There are many good reasons not to run arbitrary snapshots on your production gear. It's unrealistic to expect people to run non- RELEASE non-production code on their production gear. We can have that discussion if you don't understand that, drop me a note off- list and I'll be happy to explain it. I can see that you're upset about something, sorry if my message caused you additional stress. I actually understand the realities of production environments quite well, and believe it or not I agree with some of your frustration about how we handle support for our supported releases. We've had various public threads about these issues, which have sparked some quite-lively private discussions amongst our committers, and I'm hoping that once the long-overdue 8.3-RELEASE is out we'll be able to buckle down and start putting some of those ideas into action. Meanwhile, this is still a volunteer project, and as a result sometimes the best way to get attention to a problem is to verify that it hasn't already been fixed. You've been around more than long enough to understand this Joe. We can spend time arguing about what *should* be (actually we can't ...) but my point was in trying to help the OP get the most/best help the fastest way possible. Doug ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
And then there is this one with similar symptoms and a workaround: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=3D27899 I'm now investigating those loader.conf options. I have my crashy machine set to use them on next boot so we'll see if it crashes now that I'm using LSI SAS emulated controller. If it still crashes, we'll see what happens after that with those loader.conf options enabled. Um, if I may, that's something completely different. VMDirectPath, or PCIe passthru, is making a hardware device on a VMware host available directly to a guest. It'll take your LSI controller, in the example cited, and make it unavailable to VMware ESXi, and present it instead inside the guest environment. You do this when you have an app whose performance would suffer greatly when made to operate through the indirection that a VM naturally lives in; for example, it is quite common for FreeNAS users to pass a disk controller through to a VM guest in order to allow a virtualized FreeNAS instance to directly manage the physical disks. In that case, there are some issues with ESXi and interrupt delivery to the guest VM; virtualization doesn't actually get rid of the possibility of ESXi problems, since the hypervisor is still ultimately involved. It is certainly possible that there's some common issue involving interrupt delivery somehow, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. It also doesn't explain the experience here, where one VM basically crapped out but only after a migration - and then stayed crapped out. It would be interesting to hear about your datastore, how busy it is, what technology, whether you're using thin, etc. I just have this real strong feeling that it's some sort of corruption with the vmfs3 and thin provisioned disk format, but it'd be interesting to know if that's totally off-track. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 19:27:31 -0500, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: It also doesn't explain the experience here, where one VM basically crapped out but only after a migration - and then stayed crapped out. It would be interesting to hear about your datastore, how busy it is, what technology, whether you're using thin, etc. I just have this real strong feeling that it's some sort of corruption with the vmfs3 and thin provisioned disk format, but it'd be interesting to know if that's totally off-track. We've ruled out SAN, but we haven't ruled out VMFS. Even FreeBSD Guests on standalone ESXi servers with no SAN exhibit this crash. For the record, we only use thick provisioning and if it was corruption I'm not sure what layer the corruption could be at. The crashy servers show no abnormalities when I run either `freebsd-update IPS` or `pkg_libchk` to confirm checksums of all installed programs. Now the other data on there... it's not exactly verified, but our backups via rsnapshot seem to prove there is no issue there or we'd have lots of new files each run. ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Again, it's starting to sound like an interrupt handling issue which may or may not be limited to the storage device. You'll have to engage someone who knows those device drivers and likely have them add some debugging to the driver which can be easily flipped on (via binaries in a ramdisk - very important if you can't run sysctl because your disk IO has locked up!) to see what the current state of things. It's likely that the BSD mpt(4) and other storage drivers, and/or our interrupt handling code, is just slightly different enough to confuse the snot out of VMWare. I'd first look at the obvious - (eg, if you've just stopped receiving interrupts, even if new IO is scheduled). I'd also ask VMware if they have any tools that they can run on a VM to get the state of the internal emulated driver. For example, register dumps of the device to see if it's in a hung state, register dumps of the PIC/APIC to see what state they're in, etc. Maybe pull in someone like ixsystems and see if they can help debug this kind of stuff? If you're paying vmware for support, you could pull them into things with ixsystems and see if the two of them can help you sort this out? Thanks, Adrian ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash
Hi, * have you filed a PR? * is the crash easily reproducable? * are you able to boot some ramdisk-only FreeBSD-8.2 images (eg create a ramdisk image using nanobsd?) and do some stress testing inside that? It sounds like you've established it's a storage issue, or at least interrupt handling for storage issue. So I'd definitely try the ramdisk-only boot and thrash it using lighttpd/httperf or something. If that survives fine, I'd look at trying to establish whether there's something wrong in the disk driver(s) freebsd is using. I'm not that cluey on ESXi, but there may be some PIC/APIC/ACPI change between 7.x and 8.0 which has caused this to surface. 2c, Adrian ___ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
