Sta­bil­i­ty prob­lems solved (hard­ware problem)

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…).

2 thoughts on “Sta­bil­i­ty prob­lems solved (hard­ware problem)”

  1. Pingback: I merged a lot of ZFS patches to 7-stable « The Daily BSD
  2. Pingback: Tweets that mention Sta­bil­ity prob­lems solved (hard­ware problem) | Alexander Leidinger -- Topsy.com

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