Strange problem with 8-stable, VMWare vSphere 4 & AMD CPUs (unexpected shutdowns)

[Sean C. Farley]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Ivan Voras wrote:

> It looks like I've stumbled upon a bug in vSphere 4 (recent update) 
> with FreeBSD/amd64 8.0/8-stable (but not 7.x) guests on Opteron(s). In 
> this combination, everything works fine until a moderate load is 
> started - a buildworld is enough. About five minutes after the load 
> starts, the vSphere client starts getting timeouts while talking with 
> the host and soon after the guest VM is forcibly shut down without any 
> trace of a reason in various logs.  The same VM runs fine on hosts 
> with Xeon CPUs. The shutdown happens regardless if there is a vSphere 
> client connected.
>
> This is very repeatable, on Sun Fire X4140 hosts.
>
> With 7.x/7.stable guests everything works fine.
>
> I'm posting this for future reference and to see if anyone has 
> encountered something like that, or has an idea why this happens.

Is it related to this thread:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-February/054755.html

I have been fighting other issues (mainly countless "Command WRITE(10) 
took X.XYZ seconds" in the VM's vmware.log file under moderate I/O) with 
VMware Workstation 7 on a Linux host with an AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 
Processor, but I still have more testing to see if I can work through 
it.  I also do not want to take over this thread.

Sean
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org