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

[Adrian Chadd]

Again, it's starting to sound like an interrupt handling issue which
may or may not be limited to the storage device.

You'll have to engage someone who knows those device drivers and
likely have them add some debugging to the driver which can be easily
flipped on (via binaries in a ramdisk - very important if you can't
run sysctl because your disk IO has locked up!) to see what the
current state of things.

It's likely that the BSD mpt(4) and other storage drivers, and/or our
interrupt handling code, is just slightly different enough to confuse
the snot out of VMWare. I'd first look at the obvious - (eg, if you've
just stopped receiving interrupts, even if new IO is scheduled). I'd
also ask VMware if they have any tools that they can run on a VM to
get the state of the internal emulated driver. For example, register
dumps of the device to see if it's in a hung state, register dumps of
the PIC/APIC to see what state they're in, etc.

Maybe pull in someone like ixsystems and see if they can help debug
this kind of stuff? If you're paying vmware for support, you could
pull them into things with ixsystems and see if the two of them can
help you sort this out?

Thanks,



Adrian