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

[dane foster]

Hey all,

On 25/05/2012, at 1:47 AM, Mark Felder wrote:

> On Wed, 23 May 2012 17:30:40 -0500, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> can you please, -please- file a PR? And place all of the above
>> information in it so we don't lose it?
>> 
> 
> I'd be glad to post a PR and assist in helping to get it permanently fixed. I certainly don't want this data to get lost and honestly our business uses FreeBSD on VMWare so much that we really need a permanent fix as much as anyone else :-)
> 
> The reason I've hesitated to post a PR so far is that I didn't have any truly useful or concrete evidence of where the problem lies. After Dane Foster contacted me and told me he could recreate the crash on demand with his workload it was easier to narrow things down. The suggestion that it was an interrupts issue (by possibly Bjoern Zeeb?) and Dane's discovery that his crashes ceased when em0 and mpt0 share an IRQ, but em0 is completely unused was starting to prove there is some strong evidence here in favor of the interrupts issue.
> 
> Dane, what's the status on your end? Has your fix still been successful? Is it also stable if you simply set hint.mpt.0.msi_enable="1" ?
> 

The situation I've got that's stable now is:

hw.pci.enable_msi="0"
hw.pci.enable_msix="0"

in /boot/loader.conf

and:

samael:~:% vmstat -i                                                  [ 6:31PM]
interrupt                          total       rate
irq1: atkbd0                           6          0
irq18: em0 mpt0                  3061100         15
irq19: em1                       6891706         35
cpu0: timer                    166383735        868
cpu1: timer                    166382123        868
cpu3: timer                    166382123        868
cpu2: timer                    166382121        868
Total                          675482914       3525

Not using em0. This works for 8 (FreeBSD samael.slush.ca 8.3-STABLE FreeBSD 8.3-STABLE #1: Mon May  7 11:51:03 NZST 2012     root at samael.slush.ca:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DENE  amd64).

Neither of those settings on their own seem to stop it from happening.

The 9 box I've tried this on still hangs almost every time i run handbrake, no matter whether MSI/MSIX is enabled, or I have separate IRQs for mpt0 and em0/1

I can cause the hang mostly on demand, but not quite sure what information to provide from the hung system. If somebody can let me know what they need, including root access, I can make that happen.

Cheers,

Dane



> 
> Thanks!