Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 13:18:02 -0700 From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@freebsd.org> To: Pete French <petefrench@ingresso.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: VirtualBox, AIO and zvol's - a cautionary tale Message-ID: <CAJ-VmonG2KLcXVBpBA4_xKKT=i38HXhwFecmx_7o1Z6-3CZsAg@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <E1SXBLw-000AZw-Ee@dilbert.ingresso.co.uk> References: <E1SXBLw-000AZw-Ee@dilbert.ingresso.co.uk>
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Hi, Can you please file a PR? Having broken AIO and ZFS would be .. bad. adrian On 23 May 2012 06:11, Pete French <petefrench@ingresso.co.uk> wrote: > Am posting this to stable not really as a question, but more in case anyo= ne > else hits the same problem. Last patch tuesday one of my virtual Windows > machines =A0running under VirtualBox started crashing. By which I mean > that VirtualBox would quit. This had been running tsably for a long > tine, so it puzzled me. > > First thought was it was sme patch from patch-tuesday. But rolling back > to an earlier version of the disc showed it wasn't - the crashes were > occurring before the patch had been applied. > > I'll skip the hours of puzzlement which followed - it turrned out that > the indirect cause was that a few weeks ago I had installed Samba > onto the same server. In doing so I had enabled AIO, as this improves > Samba performance. > > What I didn't realise is that if VirtualBox finds AIO loaded it proceeds > to use it. =A0So by doing that I had switched on AIO inside my virtual > machines as well. The disc I use for my virtual machines are all zvols (i= t > performs better, and it seems that VirtualBox has a problem using AIO > to access zvols. > > But this didn;t show up for weeks because in the normal scheme of things > my virtual machines dont acccess the local dirve very much. It was only > when they started downloading patches that the crash happened. > > Solution is simple - disable AIO. All then goes back to being nice > and stable again. But it did take a while to find. > > Hope someone else finds the info usefull! > > -pete. > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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