I am going to break this saga into 2 posts, one with the ugly details for
those who are interested, and one short post with the essential questions
and observations.
I have that card with 6 60 gig drives and set the box up (freebsd 4.7?)
and it would run for a day or so and just crash. I also recall having
similar panics when moving large amounts of data. I've given up on
using the box for any real work so it's just sitting doing nothing
waiting... hoping for a solution... a glimmer of hope. ;-)
If you get it working please post.
Here is an update. While I have made progress I am not 100% hopeful for a
solution that is stable in the long term.
To make a long story short, I seem to have made the system much stable by
turning off soft updates. I was able to do a make buildworld, and then
delete the contents of /usr/obj. Previously, one of those actions was sure
to trigger a panic. Before I tried disabling soft updates I also did all
this, some of which I readily admit is voodoo:
- cable replacement
- jumped drives to Master instead of Cable Select
- Changed RAID card PCI slot
- Wiggled everything
I continued my test by cvsupping my source and doing another make
buildworld. However, this time it bombed out while working on groff. I
checked the file in an editor and it didn't look munged, so I am not sure
if there is an error in the cvs tree, an innocent file transfer error, or a
sign of deeper issues with my disk subsystem. I am going to thrash the
machine with more builds but avoid CVS for now.
Unfortunately, turning off soft updates isn't a great solution, if indeed
it IS a solution, which I am still testing. It definitely makes things
slower. My buildworld went from about 23 minutes to 34 minutes this way.
Removing the contents of /usr/obj took about 1 minute, whereas with soft
updates it took only a few seconds (though it panicked afterwards).
Update: I created a custom kernel config (adding only device pcm and
removing nothing) and successfully built it. I then installed it, rebooted,
and tried to make installworld. Bomb city! getty dumped core before I even
logged in and it got worse from there.
Then I tried deleting /usr/obj and I got the kernel panic again. :)
Observation: My last 2 panics (ffs_blkfree) reported these block numbers:
54608, 54592. Those are awfully close. Could my trouble stem from a defect
on a disk?
Things I have yet to try:
- Removing the Maxtor 160s from the RAID and trying them individually on
the motherboard controller.
- Applying a hammer to the system
Cheers,
Matt
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