Sta­bi­liz­ing 7‑stable…

The 7‑stable sys­tem on which I have sta­bil­i­ty prob­lems after an update from 7.1 to 7.2/7‑stable is now semi-stable.

The watch­dog reboots after one minute of no reac­tion (cur­rent­ly it is able to run 3 – 4 hours), and the jails come up with­out prob­lems now.

The prob­lem with the jails was, that e.g. the mysql-server start­up went into the STOP state because TTY-input was “request­ed”. I solved the prob­lem by using /dev/null as input on jail-startup. On ‑cur­rent I do not see this behav­ior (I have a 9‑current sys­tem with a lot of jails which reboots every X days, and there mysql does not go into the STOP state).

I also start the jails in the back­ground, so that one block­ing jail does not block every­thing (done like in ‑cur­rent).

To say this with code:

--- /usr/src/etc/rc.d/jail      2009-02-07 15:04:35.000000000 +0100
+++ /etc/rc.d/jail      2009-12-16 17:03:12.000000000 +0100
@@ -556,7 +556,8 @@
 fi
 _tmp_jail=${_tmp_dir}/jail.$$
 eval ${_setfib} jail ${_flags} -i ${_rootdir} ${_hostname} \
-                       \\"${_addrl}\\" ${_exec_start} > ${_tmp_jail} 2>&1
+                       \\"${_addrl}\\" ${_exec_start} > ${_tmp_jail} 2>&1 \\
+                       </dev/null

 if [ "$?" -eq 0 ] ; then
 _jail_id=$(head -1 ${_tmp_jail})
@@ -623,4 +624,4 @@
 if [ -n "$*" ]; then
 jail_list="$*"
 fi
-run_rc_command "${cmd}"
+run_rc_command "${cmd}" &

I also iden­ti­fied 57 patch­es for ZFS which are in 8‑stable, but not in 7‑stable (I do not think they could solve the dead­lock, but I do not real­ly know, and now that there is one FS on ZFS, I would like to get as much fixed as pos­si­ble). Some of them should be merged, some would be nice to merge, and some I do not care much about (but if they are easy to merge, why not…). I already have all revi­sions and the cor­re­spond­ing com­mit logs avail­able in an email-draft.

Now I just need to write a lit­tle bit of text and find some peo­ple will­ing to help (some of the changes need a review if they are applic­a­ble to 7‑stable, and every­thing should be test­ed on a scratch-box).