File system corruption with 9.2-R on PC Engines Alix boards

[Karl Pielorz]

We have a number of PC Engines Alix boards, running FreeBSD 8.2. They boot 
off of an onboard CF cards.

I recently installed a new one of these with 9.2-Release (i386) - only to 
discover that it silently (i.e. with no errors) destroys the file system 
when in use.

Typically we install these systems then flip the file system over to 
'read-only' when sending them out. The corruption happens while we're 
installing various packages etc.

We don't run journal soft-updates on these boxes - just regular 
soft-updates .

No console errors are logged, no syslog messages are logged. Just after a 
while you might go to edit '/etc/rc.conf' - to find when you vi it - it's 
now become a copy of '/etc/ntp.conf' - or other oddities.

A reboot runs fsck - which will usually fail then. Running a foreground 
check reals off thousands of duplicate errors. If you foreground check the 
file system, you're usually left with "not a lot" when it's finished (i.e. 
if you run 'fsck -y /').

8.2 runs fine (we have systems that have been running embedded for years) - 
9.2 doesn't.

I found a similar thread:

  <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-March/066697.html>

This eludes to CF card quality etc. - the cards we've been using have 
worked fine for years - and a 9.2 'flaky' system reformatted to 8.2 then 
runs fine.

Anyone else running later than 8.2 on PC Engine Alix kit?

-Karl