Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2006 15:44:03 -0400 From: Charles Ulrich <charles@idealso.com> To: freebsd-smp@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD 6.1 Instability Message-ID: <200610051544.03861.charles@idealso.com>
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Greetings, We have been running FreeBSD on our mail servers for about as long as I can= =20 remember. Recently, we decided to go SMP to handle increased mail load. Aft= er=20 assembling the hardware, installing the OS and software, and restoring all = of=20 our data, we noticed in testing that our first machine began hanging=20 semi-regularly when it began processing lots of mail. Disabling SMP=20 eliminated the hangs completely. We tried it all again on completely=20 different hardware with exactly the same result. Our conclusion: somethings= 's=20 buggy in SMP. Here are the symptoms. The machine hangs, and becomes completely=20 unresponsive. =A0It looks like a deadlock. =A0It will sometimes respond to = the=20 power button and shut down (without being able to first sync and unmount=20 filesystems), and sometimes the power button event gets caught in the=20 deadlock. =A0Sinceit's not actually a crash, there is no core dump or other= =20 debugging information. In the most recent situation, it hung at different=20 points every time I tried to compile ezm3, after successfully compiling oth= er=20 packages. We're system administrators, not kernel hackers, so this is a plea for help= =2E I=20 wouldn't know where to start, but I'm hoping someone can point me in the=20 right direction. We're also willing to give a (trustworthy) FreeBSD develop= er=20 root access to the test machine since it's just sitting idle right now. If= =20 you need to crash it, that's fine. We'll have people during normal business= =20 hours who know how to push a reset button. Thanks for your time. =2D-=20 Charles Ulrich Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com
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