From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Tue May 17 15:26:41 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B776616A4CE for ; Tue, 17 May 2005 15:26:41 +0000 (GMT) Received: from yeppers.tdkt.org (skyline.tdkt.org [209.98.211.67]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CA65443D8E for ; Tue, 17 May 2005 15:26:38 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from bcasavan@tdkt.org) Received: from chenjesu.americas.sgi.com (cfcafwp.sgi.com [192.48.179.6]) (authenticated bits=0)j4HFQVjV017498; Tue, 17 May 2005 10:26:32 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 10:26:26 -0500 (CDT) From: Brent Casavant X-X-Sender: bcasavan@chenjesu.americas.sgi.com To: Dominic Marks In-Reply-To: <200505171616.09437.dom@goodforbusiness.co.uk> Message-ID: <20050517101717.U2946@chenjesu.americas.sgi.com> References: <20050517062002.465BE16A4E3@hub.freebsd.org> <200505171616.09437.dom@goodforbusiness.co.uk> Organization: "Angeltread Software Organization" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 5.4-RC2 freezing - ATA related? X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: Brent Casavant List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 15:26:41 -0000 On Tue, 17 May 2005, Dominic Marks wrote: > I've got four machines with ICH5/6 chips in, no stability problems whatsoever, > and thats been the case since I installed them, around 5.2.1. Perhaps it is > something to do with your workload, or another piece of hardware in the > system. The machines do a lot of disc i/o so during their working days. Not so much so in this case. It was being used only as a workstation, completely idle when I wasn't sitting in front of it. While it would occasionally lock up while in active use, that was relatively rare compared to the frequent hangs just after 3AM. I do agree it could be some other piece of hardware, but the fact that at least two of us have identical problems, often triggered by the same event (nightly periodic runs), starts to point in the direction of a software bug. I can't say for certain that downgrading to 4.x solved the problem as I needed to do that install on a SCSI drive instead, in order to preserve the contents of the filesystem on the ATA drive until I could transfer everything over. If I remember correctly (forgive me, this was about a year ago), I ran a number of disk performance benchmarks and other general stress tests on the ATA drive, and never was able to manually trigger the hang. Anecdotally, a friend of mine who recently tried 5.3 ran into frequent filesystem/drive problems as well, which reverting to 4.x solved. However it didn't sound like exactly the same problem. Brent -- Brent Casavant http://www.angeltread.org/ KD5EMB -.- -.. ..... . -- -... 44 54'24"N 93 03'21"W 907FASL EN34lv