Instability with VIMAGE

[Devin Teske]

On Jan 31, 2012, at 6:31 PM, Alex wrote:

> Hello. I am running FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE, and I am having many
> instability issues. Starting a jail and adding an epair works fine
> (sort of), but if I were to walk away and come back a few hours later,
> the server would be offline and I would need to have someone locally
> reboot it. In response, I removed SCTP from the kernel to see if that
> would alleviate the problems, but it did not. I tried to terminate a
> jail via `jail -r <name>', but I received this message:
> 
> mybox# 30 second watchdog timeout expired. Shutdown terminated.
> Tue Jan 31 05:46:47 UTC 2012
> Write failed: Broken pipe
> 
> ...and at this point I would need someone to reboot the server.
> 

It's not really said here whether you're reclaiming the vnet interface with the "-vnet" flag to ifconfig(8) _before_ shutting down the jail, but it's generally not advised to rip the rug out from under the interface.

At least in 8.1, the vnet doesn't automatically re-appear in the base host, and if you rip the rug out from under the interface by shutting down the jail with "jail -r", then you have to manually reclaim the interface by using the numerical jail-id and the "-vnet" parameter to ifconfig(8).


> Am I doing something wrong? Should I avoid using VIMAGE due to its
> inherent instability?

I don't know about "inherent instability", we're using it every day quite stably with dozens of vimages. However, we're not using epair, but rather netgraph. I wrote a boot script for setting up netgraph bridges. If you like, you have a read (and download an easy-to-install FreeBSD package to try it out)...

http://druidbsd.sf.net/vimage.shtml
http://druidbsd.sf.net/download.shtml

My boot script supports both simple "vnet" usage (and makes sure to return the interface to the base host, no matter what), as well as the more complicated netgraph(4) bridging. Be sure to read-up on the first link.
-- 
Devin

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