FreeBSD 5.3 file system troubles

[Terry R. Friedrichsen]

Is anybody besides *me* having file system corruption problems with FreeBSD
5.3?  I've looked around on several of the mailing lists and found no men-
tion of this.

I have two different platforms on which I'm trying to run FreeBSD 5.3.  One
is an x86 SMP system (dual AMD Athlon 1900+) and the other is an Alpha DS-10.

On the SMP system, doing anything I/O intensive (like a kernel build) quickly
corrupts the file system - I start to encounter problems like being unable to
remove entire directory trees because the system thinks that empty directories
are not *really* empty and therefore cannot be deleted.  Other problems occur,
too.

On the Alpha system, I'm trying to get Xorg to work, with no success.  What
normally happens is that the system locks up *totally* either when trying to
configure X or when running the X server after configure generates a config
file (I'm trying multiple versions of Xorg).

The lockup means that I have to power-cycle the system to reboot.  When I do
this, the filesystem is *always* horribly damaged.  I finally gave up when I
couldn't even get into "sh" in single-abuser mode because /libexec/ld.so.1
was no longer there ...

What I'm going to try next is pulling one CPU out of the SMP system to see if
that helps.  On the Alpha, I'm just going to give up on Xorg for a while.

I'd hate to have to drop back to 4.10 or 4.11 ...

If anyone has any suggestions, or even just sympathetic words, I'd be happy
to hear them!

Thanks.

Terry R. Friedrichsen

terry at uplift.hosp.misyshealthcare.com