Please help me diagnose this crazy VMWare/FreeBSD 8.x crash

[Mark Felder]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:53:52 -0500, Adam Vande More  
<amvandemore at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Doesn't VMWare offer different types of emulated disk controllers?  If  
> so,
> that might be the easiest way to narrow the field.  Another thing maybe  
> to
> try would be to backport the mpt

Yes, they offer Paravirtual (not applicable for FreeBSD), LSI Parallel  
(default option), LSI SAS, and Buslogic (not available for 64bit).

Both LSI SAS and LSI Parallel use the mpt driver.

>
> Also, it's not VMWare's place to claim "not our problem" when you are
> paying for support.  If this doesn't happen on bare metal, it's a VMWare
> issue, or they need to demonstrate it's not their issue.  At least that
> would be the expectation I have.

You're right, but we've thrown a ton of money at their support and had  
direct phone access to their engineers. The best we can get out of them is  
"no indication this is a VMWare problem". It's easy for them to blow  
people off when they're as big as they've grown to be.

> There is also a comment on this post indicating someone else with the  
> issue
> and who has received unofficial vmware feedback.
>
> http://www.hailang.me/tech/virtual/freebsd-vmware-esx-a-weird-error-with-san-storage/

I found that post ages ago and that's me, "mf", as the only person to  
comment on it. Unfortunately our problem does not align with what he's  
describing.

>
> And then there is this one with similar symptoms and a workaround:
>
> http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=27899
>

I'm now investigating those loader.conf options. I have my crashy machine  
set to use them on next boot so we'll see if it crashes now that I'm using  
LSI SAS emulated controller. If it still crashes, we'll see what happens  
after that with those loader.conf options enabled.