dhclient in giant lock after a few days

[Jorn Argelo]

Hi all,

My FreeBSD server at home is running natd and ipfw on 6.1-STABLE. So 
it's the router and firewall for me at home. However, after a few days 
the dhclient, used for obtaining an IP address from my ISP (and the 
FreeBSD box gets that external IP address) gets into the giant lock and 
won't come out unless I kill dhclient and restart it again. Note that 
the dhclient runs fine for a few days first. After it comes in the giant 
lock, the functionality doesn't break or anything, it's just unusual 
behavior.

I've been running 6.0 on this box first, where this behavior did not 
appear. However, after upgrading to 6.1-PRERELEASE (this was not 
intended, but that's besides the point) I've been experiencing this. 
Since it was a version before the betas I figured this would be fixed 
with the release of 6.1. However, I still have the same issue after 
upgrading to 6.1-STABLE.

This is a little snapshot from top. And yes, it is constantly the most 
highest process when no HTTP or SMTP traffic passes trough.

last pid:  5339;  load averages:  0.09,  0.06,  
0.01                        up 9+15:47:15  12:04:13
105 processes: 1 running, 103 sleeping, 1 lock
CPU states:     % user,     % nice,     % system,     % interrupt,     % 
idle
Mem: 177M Active, 164M Inact, 82M Wired, 26M Cache, 57M Buf, 17M Free
Swap: 935M Total, 280K Used, 934M Free

  PID USERNAME   THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
  193 _dhcp        1  96    0  1460K   964K *Giant 172:09  5.57% dhclient


Note that this box has 6 jails with Postfix, Apache, BIND, MySQL and 
stuff like that. Also I'm using the vr(4) drivers for my NICs. Yes, I 
know that they aren't all that great, but that's the only thing I can 
use, since my VIA box doesn't have space for an external NIC.

So if anybody has any advices or ideas, I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you in advance.

Jorn