NFS write corruption on 8.0-RELEASE

[alan bryan]

--- On Fri, 2/12/10, Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca> wrote:

> From: Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca>
> Subject: Re: NFS write corruption on 8.0-RELEASE
> To: "Dmitry Marakasov" <amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru>
> Cc: freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org, freebsd-stable at freebsd.org, "John Baldwin" <jhb at freebsd.org>
> Date: Friday, February 12, 2010, 11:12 AM
> 
> 
> On Fri, 12 Feb 2010, Dmitry Marakasov wrote:
> 
> >
> > I'm planning a massive testing for this weekend,
> including removing
> > soft mount option and trying linux client/server.
> >
> > Btw, I forgot to mention that I'm experiencing other
> NFS problems from
> > time to time, including "death" of a mount (that is,
> all processes that
> > try to access it freeze; this cures itself in some
> time with a message
> > "server is alive again"). Also I've seen another
> strange thing - not
> > only the mount dies but the network is flooded with
> NFS traffic.
> > Last time I've seen it quite a while ago, so I don't
> remember the
> > circumstances and direction of the traffic.
> >
> There are some patches at:
>      http://people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem
> that may be relevant if you are using vanilla FreeBSD-8.0.
> (They're all
> now in stable/8, but are post-release of 8.0.)
> 
> rick
> 
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> 


This is interesting:

"I've seen another strange thing - not only the mount dies but the network is flooded with NFS traffic."

Rick - this sounds very similar to the issues I was seeing (and reported in the thread on freebsd-stable "Zombie NFS writing from FreeBSD clients to FreeBSD 8.0 server with ZFS".  

For the record - I updated to the latest 8-Stable and that still didn't cure my issues.  I was originally on hard mounts on udp, tried soft and TCP too, nothing solved it.

So, a few days ago I switched to using samba and mount_smbfs instead and am now running 3 days without a crash or any network traffic/load issues. (same machine, same ZFS disks, etc...)  Luckily it wasn't too painful to make the change.  When I have more time I'd like to retry NFS.

--Alan