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

Andriy Gapon avg at icyb.net.ua
Wed Feb 10 17:13:36 UTC 2010


on 10/02/2010 19:05 Ivan Voras said the following:
> On 02/10/10 17:05, Andriy Gapon wrote:
>> on 10/02/2010 17:36 Ivan Voras said the following:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Wild guess - try disabling superpages in the guests.
> 
> It looks like your guess is perfectly correct :) The guest has been
> doing buildworlds for an hour and it works fine. Thanks!
> 
> It's strange how this doesn't affect the Xeons...

I really can not tell more but there seems to be an issue between our
implementation of superpages (very unique) and AMD processors from 10h family.
I'd recommend not using superpages feature with those processors for time being.

-- 
Andriy Gapon


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