FreeBSD -STABLE servers repeatedly crashing

[Gary Mu1der]

> Gary,
> 
> Do you know what the chances are that this problem I'm experiencing
> is SMP related?  I don't mind turning off SMP, and I guess I could
> for now to see if that runs stable.  Otherwise, I think we're going
> to switch to OpenBSD, because these crashes are occuring so
> frequently (twice a day)... and as far as the patch and regression
> testing, if someone sent me a patch right now I would put it on the
> server, because the server already crashes daily, so a faulty patch
> wouldn't change much :-(.
> 
> I appreciate your response.  I'm going to do a little more research 
> today before i make my decision on a platform switch.

Only way to find out is to try. You could build and install the non-SMP
kernel and reboot when you can, or let it boot the new kernel next time
the system(s) crash.

A lot of the issues seem to be SMP-related. I really loaded up a GENERIC
5.4 kernel and wasn't able to get it to panic. What do you have to lose
at this point?

I would suggest that before committing to OpenBSD you verify that all
the hardware/software you have/use is supported under OpenBSD:

	http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html
	http://www.monkey.org/openbsd/archive/misc/0311/msg01803.html

As an example: I'm fairly sure OpenBSD has recently dropped (or will 
drop) support for the Adaptec aac driver as Theo is not happy with 
Adaptec's response to his queries for interface specs.

 From what I've head (YMMV) OpenSBD SMP support is not very optimal, 
possibly because it is likely that it was implemented extremely 
conservatively. OpenBSD MySQL with two CPUs can be slower than with one:

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/1243207&from=rss

Gary

ps. it is a case of: cost, speed, reliability - choose any two.