Hardware

A stock 5.3-RELEASE /amd64 works on my workstation, while Windows 2003 x64 version would not :-)

My company has offered me some test equipment (namely, a HP 360 with ILO, which is *great* for debugging at home!), and I has started to trip over the ULE code and find for bugs.

在-CURRENT上发表那个patch之后果然有很多热心人帮助测试。有人说在X里面接USB键盘会花，现在还在找原因……

Colin Percival has released his paper about a complex security issue that accompany with Intel HyperThreading Technology. This has became FreeBSD Security Advisory SA-05:09.htt.

So I finally tried DragonFly on one of our test servers (not my desktop :-). It seems that DragonFly still have some issues with the SATA devices. I am trying to fix it, maybe by porting some good FreeBSD ATAng code.

DragonFly has gave us some good examples that how a user-friendly operating system should, and some different way on designing a MP-capable architecture. Thanks, Matt!

As null@ advised, I have replaced the HY RAM Chips with KingSton chips, and everything goes well again!

And finally, it happend.

On Monday, one of our server, running FreeBSD, panic’ed with “ffs_clusteralloc: map mismatch”. This message is quite uncommon and should only happen when there is some “event” with the memory or hard disk.

I have suggested our administrator to reboot and do “fsck” on the volume, since it has very small block size and can not be checked background (I have made a change to warn about this to FreeBSD, and was MFC’ed to 5-STABLE so you will get the feature in 5.4-RELEASE). Unfortunatelly, the check is so slow and we start to suspect whether there is some hardware problem.

With FreeBSD, we have a stress test tool called “make universe”.

This will stress test your RAM, I/O, and CPU.

Then I found that my new system have defect RAM :-(

好事多磨：

初一：修正了一组SCSI配置问题，MFC掉的那个CAM改进也加入了内核。发现有4台机器硬件存在不同的毛病。
初二：深夜发现一些机器panic，连夜进一步加入新近MFC的UFS2错误修正。
初三：正式部署新的kernel，看上去运转良好。
初四：软件现在已经足够稳定了，但是居然有一台机器SCSI卡出了问题，已经通知厂商取备机……

It seems that if one host is fsck’ing and the other is trying to boot, then the controller will halt. I’m so tired and sick about this!