Disc lock up on 8.0-STABLE

[Florian Smeets]

On 12/22/09 3:19 PM, Pete French wrote:
>> 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 ?

Same here!

> 
>> 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 ?

I'm not 100% sure anymore, but i think i installed 7.2-RELEASE set
hw.pci.mcfg=0 in loader.conf due to 8.0-BETAX not detecting the discs
without it and then immediately upgrading to 8-STABLE.

But the box has been running 8-STABLE since around end of August, and
the first time it happened was about 10-14 days ago, after i upgraded
world+kernel.

When the problem occurs and you happen to have a shell everything you
try to run is being rejected with an error no resources for fork or
something. I had to enter reboot like 30 times before the box rebooted.
So with a bit of patience one will be able to get aditional information
out of the box.

Cheers,
Florian