5.4-RC2 freezing - ATA related?

[Brent Casavant]

On Tue, 17 May 2005 freebsd-stable-request at freebsd.org wrote:

> Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 06:40:01 -0600
> From: "Elliot Finley" <efinleywork at efinley.com>
> Subject: 5.4-RC2 freezing - ATA related?
> To: <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
> Cc: sos at freebsd.org
> Message-ID: <001801c55a14$609720d0$37cba1cd at emerytelcom.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"
> 
> This has been happening since 5.3-R, I've been tuning different parameters
> to no avail.  I've taken the disks off of the onboard ICH5 controller and
> put them a promise TX4 S150 controller, but still the same thing happens.
> 
> The system freezes, but isn't totally dead.  It'll still respond to pings,
> the screensaver still functions, but it won't respond to a CAD at the
> console.  But if I press 'Enter' at the console, it'll give me a 'login:'
> prompt, but after entering the username, it never comes back with the
> 'password:' prompt.
> 
> After manually resetting the system it boots and says 'Automatic file system
> check failed; help!' and drops into single user mode.  Running fsck manually
> corrects errors on all volumes.  Then it'll boot from that point.
> 
> This seems to be triggered by daily periodic as it happens at 3:02-3:03AM
> each time.  But it doesn't happen *every* morning.
> 
> I suspect a bug in FreeBSD because this mode of failure happens on 3
> different machines, all configured similarly.

You can add a fourth.  Ever since 5.1 (my first 5.x install) I have
experienced the same problem, again with an Intel ICH5 ATA controller.
The symptoms are exactly the same -- the hang is normally triggered
during the periodic runs just after 3AM.  The hang does occur at other
times as well, but with nowhere near the same consistency.

The only solution I found at that time was reverting to 4.10, though
that is obviously suboptimal.  I could be persuaded to reinstall 5.x
on the machine if I'd be sure to get someone to look into this.

Thanks,
Brent Casavant

-- 
Brent Casavant			http://www.angeltread.org/
KD5EMB				-.- -.. ..... . -- -...
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