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Date:      Sat, 5 May 2001 10:33:53 +0000 (GMT+00:00)
From:      auto228677@hushmail.com
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   FreeBSD 4.2 kernel panics during installation (ffs_clusteralloc)
Message-ID:  <200105051033.DAA10093@user8.hushmail.com>

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Hello,

I've been using FreeBSD 3.3-RELEASE for over a year now and decided to
perform a fresh install of FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE. I bought the official
4 CD set as I had done for 3.3.

I boot from my CD-ROM drive, eliminate unneeded device drivers, allow
FreeBSD to use my entire disk, allow the install program to choose its
default filesystem sizes, select the X-User canned set, and then sit
back and wait for the distribution files to be installed. Much to my
dismay, the kernel panics 9 times out of 10 while performing the 'bin'
install. The message is as follows:

Panic: ffs_clusteralloc: map mismatch

My machine then reboots. If, however, it manages to install 'bin' with
some apparent effort, it will choke soon after with an identical message
in one of the next installation stages. I have not been able to get
a working system. Hitting CTRL+F2 reveals numerous instances of the
following message:

ad0: READ command timeout tag=0 serv=0 - resetting
ata0: resetting devices .. done

So then I thought the smart thing to do would be to install only the
'bin' files, just to get a working system (the rest could be installed
at a later time with sysinstall). After enduring half a dozen
reboots, it finally managed to trudge through to 100% of the 'bin'
files. What then? A nice dialog box pops up saying the following:

Can't copy /kernel

Ugh!

Ok, so I reinstalled FreeBSD 3.3 (which encounters no problems
at all -- wd0 driver) and fired up a web browser. Some searching on
google.com brought me to the FreeBSD bug reports page. A particular
bug report caught my attention:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=16740
The kernel panics with "ffs_clusteralloc: map mismatch"

This "critical" problem has been unresolved for almost a year.
One of the contributors to the PR (Chris Hardie) narrowed
the problem down to heavy disk activity. This would make sense
in my case, because of the heavy disk activity during the
installation procedure. The fact that people are experiencing
this same problem on different disk devices (both SCSI and IDE)
leads me to conclude it must be some kernel bug.

Fixes? The PR mentions that

sysctl -w vfs.ffs.doreallocblks=0

may provide a workaround for the problem by avoiding a certain code
path, but some mentioned that this introduces a different bug. In any
event, how would I issue that command during the 4.2 install? And
what if it fails to do anything?

Any help is much appreciated. I'm no kernel hacker, so please dumb
things down a bit  :-)

Thanks in advance.

Hardware
========
Intel Pentium 200MMX
64MB RAM
2.5GB HDD (IDE)

The hardware is in excellent condition.










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