FreeBSD Crash without Errors, Warnings, or Panics

[Matthew Hagerty]

Did these serious race conditions exist in 5.4 also?  This is not good 
news and it would be nice if there was some place to find out about what 
hardware drivers are considered stable for production servers.  I always 
assumed that this was the function of the supported hardware page.  Is 
this not the case?

Can I pull just a certain driver from stable and use it with a release 
branch (no even sure how I would do that)?  Or will there be dependency 
problems?  I suppose I could run on stable until the driver is fixed in 
a release branch, but I need this box up and online, and I've always 
read that the stable branch is not the place for production servers.

Is there any place I read about the status and work being done on the 
arm driver?

Thanks,
Matthew


Paul Saab wrote:
> There are serious race conditions with amr in 6.0 that can cause 
> serious hangs.  I suggest you take the amr driver from RELENG_6 and 
> try that.
>
> Matthew Hagerty wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I'm running 6.0-RELEASE-p5 on a Toshiba built server: dual Xeon Intel 
>> motherboard with a LSILogic MegaRAID (amr0) controller.  This machine 
>> has been running for about 2 years now, and was very stable until I 
>> updated from 5.3 to 5.4, and now 6.0.  The crashing seems to be 
>> totally random and I have had it crash in as little as 12 hours and 
>> as long as 143 days.
>>
>> When the box goes down it does so in a strange way.  First, it still 
>> responds to network probes like ping (usually), however, all console 
>> access is ignored.  Also, some network ports still respond, like a 
>> telnet to port 22 to test SSH will yield an SSH banner, but trying to 
>> connect with SSH just hangs.  Sometimes this is also true of the SMTP 
>> server, but not always.  This also makes it impossible for me to use 
>> CARP to swap to the recently purchased spare machine, since the 
>> network interface is generally still responding so CARP does not 
>> detect a problem.
>>
>> My biggest problem with this is that there are *never* any console 
>> messages or log entries in any logs, no warnings about disk failure, 
>> buffer exhaustion, system failures, etc..  The machine simply seems 
>> to stop responding and the only way to correct the problem is a hard 
>> reboot.
>>
>> A strange thing did happen yesterday though, I believe I caught the 
>> box on the verge of failure.  I was SSH'd in and did a ps to check 
>> things out.  There were about 100 of these entries:
>>
>> 55050  ??  D      0:00.00 postmaster: ipa ipa ::1(63061) startup 
>> (postgres)
>>
>> The box runs a web-based app and connects to a local Postgres DB 
>> which seemed to be unable to start new connections being requested by 
>> the PHP scripts.  At any rate, I stopped Apache and then tried to 
>> stop Postgres which resulted in (or just happened to coincide with) 
>> the box locking up and no longer responding to my SSH commands or 
>> attempts to reconnect with SSH.  I hardly think this is a Postgres 
>> problem, but even if it was, a userland app should *not* be able to 
>> bring down a box...
>>
>> Can anyone shed some light on this, give me some options to try?  
>> What happened to kernel panics and such when there were serious 
>> errors going on?  The only glimmer of information I have is that 
>> *one* time there was an error on the console about there not being 
>> any RAID controller available.  I did purchase a spare controller and 
>> I'm about to swap it out and see if it helps, but for some reason I 
>> doubt it.  If a controller like that was failing, I would certainly 
>> hope to see some serious error messages or panics going on.
>>
>> I have been running FreeBSD since version 1.01 and have never had a 
>> box so unstable in the last 12 or so years, especially one that is 
>> supposed to be "server" quality instead of the make-shift ones I put 
>> together with desktop hardware.  And last, I'm getting sick of my 
>> Linux admin friends telling me "told you so!  should have run 
>> Linux...", please give me something to stick in their pie holes!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Matthew
>>
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