Recent MFC to 7 causes crash on VMware ESXi

[Tom McLaughlin]

John Baldwin wrote, On 02/05/2010 08:27 AM:
> On Thursday 04 February 2010 10:00:55 pm Tom McLaughlin wrote:
>> Hi all, a recent MFC to 7-STABLE has started to cause issues for my VMs
>> on VMware ESXi 3.5u4.  After loading the mpt driver for the LSI disk
>> controller the VM just shuts off.  The workaround is to change the disk
>> controller to the BusLogic type.  Still, it used to work up until last
>> week.  The change was made around January 26th and based on the commits
>> that day I'm guessing it's either r203047 or r203073
>>
>> I have the same issue with both amd64 and i386 VMs.  This affects HEAD
>> and 8-STABLE as well and first affected HEAD over the summer.  (I just
>> worked around it and went about my business at the time. :-/)  I've
>> attached a dmesg from a kernel before the problem and one from after it
>> started.
> 
> What if you set 'hw.clfush_disable=1' from the loader?
> 

Yes, that corrected it on all my VMs.  I've talked to people on ESXi 4
and they do not see the problem.  I have yet to try 3.5u5 to see if this
is a non-issue.  3.5 will be supported for awhile longer from VMware.
I'm going to try upgrading the box during the week.

tom

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