5.4-RC2 freezing - ATA related?

[Hans Petter Selasky]

On Wednesday 18 May 2005 17:03, Jamie Heckford wrote:
> On Mon, May 16, 2005 at 06:40:01AM -0600, Elliot Finley wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> > ASUS P4P800
> > 2G RAM (though the other affected systems only have 1G)
> > 80G Seagate Barracuda SATA drives (one system now on Promise TX4 S150
> > controller, others on onboard ICH5)
> >
> > On my lightly loaded systems, it happens rarely.  On my mailserver
> > (fairly heavy disk load), it happens quite frequently.
> >
> > How can I troubleshoot this?
>
>
> Help? ;)

There is a bug in "machine/bus.h" (was: "machine/bus_at386.h") that might 
cause random freezes, but I'm not sure if it is related:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=80980

--HPS