Freezes on heavy disk I/O

[Panagiotis Astithas]

Konstantin 'Kosta' Welke wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I've got a box running FreeBSD 5.2.1. Sometimes, it just
> freezes. Doesn't react to _any_thing except a hard reset.
> 
> This is reproductable in some cases, all involving mainly
> disk I/O.
> 
> 1) When burning a CD (on another computer) from a samba share
> on the freebsd box, the box repliably freezes. This also
> happens when I'm encoding a DVD rip to avi on my windows box,
> while the DVD files are on the freebsd samba server.
> 
> 2) When doing stuff like portupgrade -a, it often (but always
> at different files/ports) freezes. This happens especially
> often when compiling gcc. (That's why I'm using the package now).
> 
> 3) Sometimes it just freezes like this, when playing an mp3,
> surfing the 'net, etc.
> 
> I used memtest enabling all test for 9 hours finding no errors.
> Also, it's no overheating problem as it is not overclocked
> nor is there any hot air coming out of the CPU fan when those
> freezes occur.
> 
> Any ideas?

I have similar observations in my 5.2.1 machine. The recurring theme has 
always been that I was running under X and the freeze killed the 
console, although the machine responded to ping.

When I tried the same action (a "portsdb -uU" or "portupgrade -a" in my 
case) from a virtual console I saw a panic. Since this never happens on 
my -current machine, I believe it is something already fixed in the tree.

Cheers,
-- 
Panagiotis Astithas
Electrical & Computer Engineer, PhD
Network Management Center
National Technical University of Athens, Greece