How to report bugs (Re: VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...)

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 01:37:25PM -0700, Gore Jarold wrote:

> > The larger issue here is that apparently you have
> > been suffering in
> > silence for many years with your various
> > frustrations and they have
> > finally exploded into this email.  This is really a
> > poor way to
> > approach the goal of getting your problems solved:
> > it is fundamentally
> > a failure of your expectations to think that without
> > adequately
> > reporting your bugs that they will somehow get
> > fixed.
> 
> 
> I need to clarify and respond to this ... my point was
> that every release since 5.0 has had some new and
> interesting instability in this regard.  Every time a
> new release comes out, it seems to be "fixed", only to
> reveal some other new and interesting instability.
> 
> So, no, I have not silently suffered with _any one_
> particular problem - they never seem to last more than
> one release or two.  It is only now, however, that I
> have come to realize that I am in the same spot
> (overall) today as I was in early 2004.  The details
> are slightly different, but the end result is that my
> rsyncs and cps and rms are too much for FreeBSD, and
> have been for 3 years now.
> 
> So what I am saying is, individual causes of
> instability (seem to) come and go, but I am not any
> better of today than I was with 5.0.  I have just
> realized this, and that is why I make my frustration
> known today.

OK, but nevertheless the point stands.  When you encounter a critical
issue in FreeBSD, the sensible way to go about addressing it is to
file a suitably complete PR, instead of just gritting your teeth,
raising your blood pressure, and hoping that someone else will
accidentally fix it in the next release.

Of course, filing a PR is not a guarantee that it will be fixed
(e.g. the "snapshot fills a filesystem" problems, which result from
deeper architectural issues and in practise may require contracting a
developer to get fixed), but at least you will have done your part.

> > Without these two things there is really very little
> > that a developer
> > can do to try and guess what might possibly be
> > happening on your
> > system.  However, it appears that we might now be
> > making some
> > progress:
> > 
> > > ssh user at host rm -rf backup.2
> > > ssh user at host mv backup.1 backup.2
> > > ssh user at host cp -al backup.0 backup.1
> > > rsync /files user at host:/backup.0
> > > 
> > > The /files in question range from .2 to 2.2
> > million
> > > files, all told. This means that when this script
> > > runs, it first either deletes OR unlinks up to 2
> > > million items.  Then it does a (presumably) zero
> > cost
> > > move operation.  Then it does a hard-link-creating
> > cp
> > > of the same (up to 2 million) items.
> > 
> > Please provide additional details of how the
> > filesystems in question
> > are configured, your kernel configuration, hardware
> > configuration, and
> > the debugging data referred to in 2) above.
> 
> 
> I will collect all of this and submit it the next time
> the system crashes...

Thanks.

Kris
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