Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:27:29 +0100 From: "Robert Eckardt" <Robert.Eckardt@Robert-Eckardt.de> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Did I take the wrong bus with FreeBSD 6 to VMware? Message-ID: <20070314215639.M99480@Robert-Eckardt.de>
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Hi, for some time I'm trying to get FreeBSD 6 running on my server as a host for VMware and several other functions. I'm using a 1.7GHz Pentium M 735 on an AOpen i855GMEm-LFS mobo w/ USB, VGA, 2xGbit/s, 2xPATA channels etc. on board. I used to run FBSD-5.2.1 with vmware3 on an Epox mobo w/ a 2GHz Celeron without problems. After changing HW (mobo, CPU, HDD) and OS (FBSD6.0) I found the system to "freeze" upon accessing an USB device when vmware was running. So my first investigations led to its driver, but in some cases heavy disk I/O was sufficient to cause a freeze. Since the situation got worse with FreeBSD 6.2 I started to work on it more systematically and found the following (actually I was on the verge to switch to Linux CentOS 4.4 or OpenSUSE 10.2 with VMware Server running nicely, but the HD and network performance were disappointing): 1)**ACPI off, "Assign USB IRQ" disabled in BIOS, vmware3 started: vmware3 runs fine, but no USB devices. 2)**ACPI off, "Assign USB IRQ" enabled in BIOS, vmware3 started: system "freezes" with network connections breaking, endless messages ad2: WARNING: - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly ad2: WARNING: - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER MODE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly ad2: WARNING: - SETFEATURES ENABLE RCACHE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly ad2: WARNING: - SETFEATURES ENABLE WCACHE taskqueue timeout - completing request directly ad2: WARNING: - SET_MULTI taskq..... ad2: FAILURE [or TIMEOUT] - WRITE:DMA timed out [or retrying] LBA=.... g_vs_done():ad2s1e[WRITE(offset=...., length=....)]error = 5 typing reboot will finally reboot the system after several hours, nothing in the logs though. 3)**ACPI off, "Assign USB IRQ" enabled in BIOS, additional PCI-VGA card installed, using either PCI-VGA *or* on-board VGA, vmware3 started: vmware3 runs fine, also when accessing the USB device. 4)**ACPI on, "Assign USB IRQ" enabled in BIOS, additional PCI-VGA card installed, using on-board VGA, vmware3 started: system "freezes" with messages above. So, what's the relation between the scenarios? Where can I tweak the system to get it stable? Since I spend already several man-days on getting VMware running on my machine, I would like to help further debugging by making additional tests, but I don't know where to start. I can live without ACPI (for the time being) -- the old system consumes 125W while the Pentium M machine stays at 42W with ACPI taking about another 8W in idle-state. For me it seems essential why enabling/disabling USB in the BIOS or adding an additional PCI-VGA card stabilizes the system and why the unstable system behaves the same way like with enabling ACPI. I put some boot_verbose-logs on http://www.robert-eckardt.de/ghost/ Regards, Robert -- Dr. Robert Eckardt --- Robert.Eckardt@Robert-Eckardt.de
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