Stability problems with 7-stable (after 7.1 -> 7.2 -> 7-stable)

[Ivan Voras]

Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> please CC me on replies.
> 
> I have a system which was at 7.1-pX. After the update to 7.2-p5 it 
> started to exhibit deadlocks after some minutes of uptime.
> 
> With 7.1 (generic kernel) it was running fine, with 7.2 generic the 
> problems started directly.
> 
> The system is now at 7-stable with a custom kernel 
> (http://www.Leidinger.net/test/ALCATRAZ), basically generic without 
> unneeded drivers plus witness/invariants/sw-watchdog.
> 
> The system is an AMD Dual Core with NVidia MCP61 chipset 
> (http://www.Leidinger.net/test/dmesg.alcatraz), 2 GB RAM, 2 harddisks 
> and FreeBSD 32bit install.

Some generic things to try:
	- did you monitor the system with something (top or systat -vm) to see 
if there is something unusual, like interrupt storms?
	- no physical access is a problem; If you do manage it, I'd say try 
running single user for some time with systat -vm just to see what happens.

I would not trust ZFS in 7-stable since it lags a bit behind patches 
done to 8 but 7.2 should be fine - at least I don't have any such 
problems with it (though no AMD boxes to test them with it).

If you haven't updated your ZFS pools, I'd suggest reverting back to 
7.1, then building or downloading an 8.0 kernel and try it with 7.1 
userland (reboot -k ...) simply to see if it helps.