FreeBSD 5.3 freezes under heavy hdd load

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 04:05:39PM -0500, Brian Reichert wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 05:12:44PM +0000, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> > It is necessary to increase KSTACK_PAGES (e.g. to 4) on machines with
> > certain patterns of heavy disk write load to avoid double faults in
> > the softupdates code (softupdates has potentially unbounded call stack
> > and can overflow the default kernel stack size without too much
> > effort).
> 
> Can these 'certain patterns' be characterized?

Probably combinations of lots of writes and removes of directories.

> I've got a system
> that hangs on haavy rsync usage, where the file sizes can me measured
> in a half-gig or more...
> 
> > This would cause panics though, not freezes.
> 
> I can't tell remotely if all of my hangs are panics, as it's a
> remote box.  Once, on the console of a hung box, I found
> 
>   panic: worklist_remove: not on list
> 
> This box did not reboot of it's own accord, and has wedged again
> under a similar workload...

That's probably different - as I said, the problem I'm talking about
causes double faults.

Kris