Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:10:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com> To: freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: i386/29045: Heavy disk usage causes panic in ffs_blkfree Message-ID: <200107270010.f6R0A1020956@freefall.freebsd.org>
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The following reply was made to PR i386/29045; it has been noted by GNATS.
From: Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com>
To: Ian Dowse <iedowse@maths.tcd.ie>
Cc: freebsd-gnats-submit@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: i386/29045: Heavy disk usage causes panic in ffs_blkfree
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 20:01:33 -0400
Update:
On Saturday, July 21 I did some work on the machine that's
having this problem.
First, I attempted to establish a way to reliably crash the
machine so I could be sure if/when I fixed it. Unfortunately,
I was unable to do this. I tried using bonnie++ to cause the
crash, but it didn't cause any problems. The only thing I can
seem to get it to crash all the time is to copy and delete
~30G of data (~50,000 files) 3 or 4 times. This almost always
crashes the system by the fourth time.
What I did do, that will hopefully be some help in the resolution
of this PR, is remove the 80 conductor cable and install a 40
conductor IDE cable (no other changes whatsoever). The mobo
BIOS faithfully throttled the drive to ata33. I then put the
machine back to work, but I've been running additional copy
operations on the drive whenever the system's not in use. Basically,
at this point the computer has seen drive activity in excess of 2x
what it normally takes to cause a panic and has not crashed.
I then ran the md5 test as suggested earlier and had no problems
between the two runs. In other words, slowing the drive down to
ata33 seems to have solved the problem.
My question now is: Is there anything more I can do to help isolate
what really caused this problem? I have a few theories currently:
1) ata100 simply doesn't really work
2) either the Promise controller or the IBM HDD has a broken
ata100 implementation
3) FreeBSD's ata driver doesn't do ata100 properly
4) IBM is serious when they say the 80 conductor cable can't be
longer than 18" (the one I had was a few inches longer)
If #3 is the case, I'd like to help fix the problem.
If #4 is the case, it shouldn't be too hard to avoid it in the future.
If #1 or 2 is the case, there's the possibility that the ata driver
can be modified to work around the problem.
Regardless, it would be nice to be able to use ata100 in this and
future machines. I'm open to suggestions.
-Bill
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