Strange problem with 8-stable, VMWare vSphere 4 & AMD CPUs (unexpected shutdowns)

Ivan Voras ivoras at freebsd.org
Wed Feb 10 15:36:24 UTC 2010


It looks like I've stumbled upon a bug in vSphere 4 (recent update) with 
FreeBSD/amd64 8.0/8-stable (but not 7.x) guests on Opteron(s). In this 
combination, everything works fine until a moderate load is started - a 
buildworld is enough. About five minutes after the load starts, the 
vSphere client starts getting timeouts while talking with the host and 
soon after the guest VM is forcibly shut down without any trace of a 
reason in various logs. The same VM runs fine on hosts with Xeon CPUs. 
The shutdown happens regardless if there is a vSphere client connected.

This is very repeatable, on Sun Fire X4140 hosts.

With 7.x/7.stable guests everything works fine.

I'm posting this for future reference and to see if anyone has 
encountered something like that, or has an idea why this happens.



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