Disc lock up on 8.0-STABLE

[Pete French]

> i'm trying to track down the same problem. The box in question has
> everything on UFS (mirrored ataraid) and a backup disk with ZFS on it
> attached to USB.

This is very interesting to know! It seems you have managed to get a lot
more information out of it than I have.

> As the box is remote with only ssh access, it's a little difficult to
> debug this. During the weekend i waited till 3 o'clock with a top
> running, and saw that hundreds/thousands of /bin/sh processes were
> started. After that i commented out periodic daily in /etc/crontab, that
> "solved" the problem for me.

Interesting - I have tried running the daily periodic processes by hand, but
that does not trigger it. Possibly it is something about being run from
cron maybe ?

> I was not able to debug this any further yet, i have one other box with
> all UFS and a ZFS backup disc also running latest 8-STABLE but it does
> not exhibit the problem.

Same here :-( My other box is identical hardware and almost config (UFS
and ZFS) but it works fine.

I am not sure that ym debug kernel will help now - assuming this is the
same thing as you are seeing, it sounds like a process running amok rather
than any kernel bug. Was yoour system a fresh install, or an upgrade from
7-STABLE ?

-pete.