High disk load +mount/atacontrol/NFS/SMBFS crashes the system

Garrett Cooper youshi10 at u.washington.edu
Mon Apr 16 06:33:22 UTC 2007


Alejandro Pulver wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Apr 2007 17:40:38 -0700
> Garrett Cooper <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Alejandro Pulver wrote:
>>> Hello.
>>>
>>> I have experienced the following problem a couple of times in 2
>>> different machines and FreeBSD versions (see below): when the disk is
>>> continuously reading/writing (like when copying/extracting a file,
>>> checking the filesystem in the background, etc.) my system crashes
>>> sometimes (it's not an everyday thing, but quite frustrating when it
>>> happens).
>>>
>>> When copying from another machine by NFS/SMBFS more than one file at
>>> the same time (or when using the disk, like described above) often
>>> crashes (and the disk light indicator turns off). Running "atacontrol
>>> ad0 mode UDMA100" when it was UDMA133 crashed the system (the disk
>>> activity indicator was always on) when I tried to solve the problem
>>> that way. Also when I was installing a port which installs many files
>>> on the second machine without using NFS/SMBFS, trying to mount a local
>>> NTFS filesystem (with kernel driver) crashed.
>>>
> [...]
>> Ale,
> 
> Hello.
> 
> Thank you for your reply.
> 
>>     Could you provide more information about your machine, in particular 
>> the devices attached (lspci -vv from sysutils/pciutils does the trick) 
>> and the options enabled in your custom kernel please?
> 
> Sure. I have updated the file (added pci_machine_1.txt and
> pci_machine_2.txt). The kernel configuration is already there (named
> ATHLON-PHOBOS), the second machine has a default SMP kernel.
> 
> http://people.freebsd.org/~alepulver/disk-crash.tar.bz2
> 
>>     Also, could you provide more information about what the settings are 
>> that you are using for NFS and SMBFS (-rsize, -wsize, special 
>> mountd/rpcbind options, etc).
>> -Garrett
> 
> I am not using nothing special here. In rc.conf:
> 
> rpcbind_enable="YES"
> nfs_server_enable="YES"
> nfs_client_enable="YES"
> 
> And the commands (at different times):
> 
> # mount deimos:/wxp /mnt
> # mount -t smbfs //administrator at mariana/c /mnt
> 
> After both FreeBSD machines crashed when the problem happened (because
> of the NFS waiting infinitely), I started using "-i". The second
> command was to copy some data from a Windows machine.
> 
> BTW I don't think the problem is related to NFS/SMBFS but to the disk
> drivers, since it happens without them too. One is ATA (has an year)
> and the other is SATA (new). However I am not experienced in this to
> tell.
> 
> Thanks and Best Regards,
> Ale

Ale,
	I'm not sure what's going on exactly based on the information you 
provided, but I would try the following steps to isolate the issue:

1) See if you can upgrade the first machine to a later version of 
FreeBSD, say 6.2. I believe that there were related issues resolved in 
6.2, but my memory could be incorrect. See if your problems occur after 
that.
2) Try grabbing a different machine if possible and see if the same 
issue occurs when you put the new machine as server and client with one 
of the other machines.
3) Try switching roles with the 2 machines. If machine 1 is usually 
server, let it play client and vice versa with machine 2.
4) Remove the new drive if possible, see if issue goes away. If it does, 
try acquiring a cheap(er) drive and put it

	Also, it appears that another FreeBSD team member had a similar issue 
(see: http://people.freebsd.org/~pho/stress/log/cons205.html and 
http://people.freebsd.org/~pho/stress/log/cons225.html). I dunno how but 
it showed up as one of the leading searches on Google.

	It looks like a (localized) filesystem issue, but I'm not sure what it 
is exactly.

-Garrett


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