requesting vinum help

[Cosmin Stroe]

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> On Wednesday, 26 November 2003 at 12:04:52 -0600, Cosmin Stroe wrote:
> >
> > I am using vinum atm, and I am having serious problems with it.  After
> > about 16 hrs of writing data to a vinum volume via NFS at a constant data
> > stream of 200k/sec and reading at 400k/sec at the same time, the whole
> > machine just freezes, hard.  The only thing I can do is reboot.  This
> > behavior appears in 4.8 and 5-CURRENT.  I have no indication of what is
> > wrong, or how to go about finding it out.  The problem is either with NFS
> > or Vinum, and I'm leaning towards Vinum (because of the failure in both
> > -STABLE and -CURRENT).
> >
> > I'm not the kind of person that relies on other people, and I like to fix
> > my own problems, but this is a problem which I cannot fix at this time.
> > So, I'm planning to look through the code of vinum and start messing with
> > it to figure out how it works and how to debug it.
> 
> This is unlikely to get you very far.  Some more details (offline if
> you prefer) would be handy, but as you say, you can't even be sure
> that it's Vinum.  The best thing would be to get the system into the
> kernel debugger at the point of freeze, if that's possible, and try to
> work out what has happened.
> 

Quick question:  If this is a software problem with vinum, there should be 
no way it can hard lock a machine.  Is this assumption correct ?  I should 
be able to invoke the kernel debugger by pressing the hotkey 
(ctrl+alt+esc) while the machine is locked and get a backtrace (altho i'd 
be in an ISR servicing the hotkey, so i'm not sure it'd do much good).

Any special suggestions on debugging this kind of freezing problem ?  The 
hardware has been tested and it's good (CPU,RAM,HDs). (some kind of 
watchdog in software ??)


> > What would also be appreciated is an overall "map" of how vinum is
> > organized and how it works.
> 
> You've read the documentation on http://www.vinumvm.org/, right?  If
> you have any questions, I'm sure it can be improved on.
> 

Yes :).

> Greg
> --
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> 


Cosmin Stroe.