Freebsd 8 Release /usr Die After host VMWARE Crash

[Andrew Snow]

This should never happen!  I hardly know where to start...

The possibilities I can think of are:

1. A bug in UFS2 filesystem handling code (it has to be considered)
2. the blade suffered from undetected memory or CPU corruption
3. A misconfiguration somewhere somehow disabled synchronous disk device
writes.  Possibly in freebsd (did you mount it async?), possibly in the 
SAN (doubtful unless you powered if off at the same time as the blades), 
possibly in vmware (i dont know of any options in esx that let you do 
something as silly as this).
4. You were using VMFS thin provisioning and the volume ran out of space
5. You were using VMFS extents and one or more LUNs vanished during the 
host crashing

Obviously all of these possibilities seem very unlikely.. but it would 
take more precise knowledge of your setup to narrow it down.  In the 
scheme of things it seems a bit premature to blame FreeBSD but bugs do 
happen.


- Andrew