Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Adrian Chadd]

Hi,

* have you filed a PR?
* is the crash easily reproducable?
* are you able to boot some ramdisk-only FreeBSD-8.2 images (eg create
a ramdisk image using nanobsd?) and do some stress testing inside
that?

It sounds like you've established it's a storage issue, or at least
interrupt handling for storage issue. So I'd definitely try the
ramdisk-only boot and thrash it using lighttpd/httperf or something.
If that survives fine, I'd look at trying to establish whether there's
something wrong in the disk driver(s) freebsd is using. I'm not that
cluey on ESXi, but there may be some PIC/APIC/ACPI change between 7.x
and 8.0 which has caused this to surface.

2c,


Adrian