Critical problems with md on 5.0-RC1

[Jacques Garrigue]

There is a very serious problem in the md filesystem, since at least
5.0-RELEASE, and it is not yet fixed.

You can see details of the problem at

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=47538

Since this problem may result in data corruption, I believe that at
least there should be a warning in the release notes about NOT using a md
filesystem for /tmp. Lots of people seem to do that.

Short description (assuming 256M of machine memory, and about 230M of
data in /usr/X11R6/lib):
  mdmfs -s256M /dev/md0 /mnt
  tar cf - -C /usr/X11R6 | tar xf - -C /mnt
  diff -r /usr/X11R6/lib /mnt/lib
And you start seeing the differences...
Apparently some sectors are just zeroed. File size does not change.
Pretty hard to detect.

Anothere problem I have is that md on a vnode in an msdos partition
doesn't work. I have been using it to get extra disk space on a
laptop.  In 5.0-RELEASE the system just froze, now the file system
starts refusing to sync while unpacking a big archive with unzip.

As a conclusion, two of my favorite features since FreeBSD-2.2, namely
memfs and vn, are currently broken. I suppose that one has to wait a
bit after an hostile takeover :-)

Cheers,

---
Jacques Garrigue  Kyoto University garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG
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RE: Problems with DP2 install floppies ... ?

[Jacques Garrigue]

Since I finally succeded in installing DP2 booting from floppy, I
thought I might answer.

On 19-Nov-2002 Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 
> 'K, that is what I did ...
> 
> One final issue on this first attempt ... when I go into 'partition' an
> existing drive, how do I get it to 'mount' my existing swap device?
> rightnow, I just deleted and created it, but that just doesn't sound ...
> safe ...

I did the same. A bit strange (why would we need a swap during
installation anyway), but not dangerous, since you're not formatting
anything.


> On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, John Baldwin wrote:
>>
>> On 19-Nov-2002 Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>> >
>> > Just got everything up, made sure that it knew how to mount my file
>> > systems, watched it fsck those same file systems ... but as soon as it
>> > started to install, it reported out of space errors ...
>> >
>> > On ALT-F2, it looks like its trying to write to:
>> >
>> > ./usr/share/dict/..
>> >
>> > instead of, what I believe its supposed to be:
>> >
>> > /mnt/usr/share/dict/..
>> >
>> > which would explain why its running out of disk space, as its trying to
>> > write to the floppy ... ?
>> >
>> > Going to ALT-F4 and doing a df shows that everything appears to be mounted
>> > as expected (/mnt, /mnt/dev, /mnt/usr, etc) ...
>> >
>> > known problem, or did I screw up a step here?
>> >
>> > thanks ...
>>
>> Did you try to restart your install via Ctrl-C?  If so,
>> don't, the restart stuff doesn't really work right.

This may be related to Ctrl-C, but considering the time it takes to
reboot, I'm willing to take the risk...

Finally I could locate the problem: go to the options screen and set
the installation root to /mnt. For some reason it is /, which seems
wrong. After that I could install... but failed after the install
finished for some other reason I don't remember.
I couldn't do the post-install configuration, but since it was enough
to boot, I just did it after reboot.
And now, after compiling the packages that are not available, I have a
nice running system.

Is the floppy network install really working if you don't hit Ctrl-C?
I seem to remember it was failing anyway, but I might be wrong.

Aside question: I realized that the compiler sets -mcpu=pentiumpro by
default. Is it the correct option for a Crusoe CPU?

---
Jacques Garrigue  Kyoto University garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG

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