After putting the disks of the 7–sta­ble sys­tem which exhib­ited sta­bil­ity prob­lems into a com­pletely dif­fer­ent sys­tem (it is a rented root-server, not our own hard­ware), the sys­tem now sur­vived more than a day (and still no trace of prob­lems) with the UFS setup. Pre­vi­ously it would crash after some minutes.

The ZFS setup with the changed hard­ware had a prob­lem dur­ing the night before (like always after all my ZFS related changes on this machine), but on this machine I changed all locks in ZFS from shared locks to exclu­sive locks (this extended the uptime from 4 – 6 hours to “until I rebooted the morn­ing after because of hang­ing processes”), so this may be because of this. I do not know yet if we will test the ZFS setup with the pure 7-stable source we use now or not (the goal was to get back a sta­ble sys­tem, instead of play­ing around with unre­lated stuff).

It looks like some kind of hard­ware prob­lem was uncov­ered by updat­ing from 7.1 to 7.2 (and 7-stable sub­se­quently). This new machine has a com­pletely dif­fer­ent chipset, a new CPU and RAM and PSU and … so I do not really know what caused this (but the fact that the pre­vi­ous sys­tem did not rec­og­nize the CPU after replac­ing it with a big­ger one and the obser­va­tion that only shared locks with a spe­cific usage pat­tern where affected lets me point towards miss­ing microc­ode updates…).

1. I merged a lot of ZFS patches to 7-stable « The Daily BSD Says:
   January 15th, 2010 at 00:01

   […] Sta­bil­ity prob­lems solved (hard­ware problem) […]

2. Tweets that mention Sta­bil­ity prob­lems solved (hard­ware problem) | Alexander Leidinger -- Topsy.com Says:
   January 15th, 2010 at 03:28

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