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Date:      Wed, 5 Apr 2000 09:44:08 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Brian Dean <brdean@unx.sas.com>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be>, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Vinum breakage (was: 2nd call for reviews and tests: buf->bio patch)
Message-ID:  <200004051344.JAA15337@dean.pc.sas.com>
In-Reply-To: <20000405150203.B66569@freebie.lemis.com> from Greg Lehey at "Apr 5, 2000 03:02:03 pm"

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Greg Lehey wrote:
>   Technical explanation: A buffer header gets corrupted between the
>   time the top half of the driver issues the request to the disk
>   driver, and when the I/O completes. Currently, the evidence is
>   pointing towards the disk driver, but the corruption is of such an
>   unusual nature that it's difficult to guess what's going on.

This type of bug sounds like a perfect candidate for using the
kernel's hardware debug support (on IA32), and would allow you to take
a trace trap and drop to the kernel debugger when anyone modifies the
buffer header, assuming you can cover the corrupted area with the 4
debug registers available, which can cover a range of 16 bytes, in 4
byte chunks.  This is exactly the type of situation that inspired me
to add the support in the first place.

Hopefully, when I get a little bit of time, I can merge the code that
I use so that we can do this in a straight forward way from within the
kernel debugger.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean				brdean@unx.sas.com
SAS Institute Inc.			bsd@FreeBSD.ORG


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