Re: How to solve mysterious system lockups?

N. Harrington wrote:
--- Garrett Cooper <youshi10@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

N. Harrington wrote:
Hello
I have several systems that are used as squid
caching servers. I have some systems that use SCSI
disks and some that use SATA disks. They are
identical in everyway except for the sata vs SCSI
drives.

At random times, the sata based systems seem to
be
freezing. You can ping them and they respond, but
you
cannot log in. Nor are any logs processed during
that
time.

I figure it mist be something to do with the
disks,
but I am not sure how to solve it. There seems to
be
little rhyme or reason. It does not happen
necessarily
during busy times. It can happen in the middle of
the
night.

Any pointers in how to track down the cause would
be
much appreciated.

Tyan S2881 Motherboard - 4gigs mem
Using 4 SATA (or scsi) drives
FreeBSD amd64 6.2-STABLE.

Thanks!

Nicole
Nicole,
What's the driver in use for the SATA and the
SCSI drives?
-Garrett

Hi Garret
Here is the driver info.

-- SATA

atapci0: <SiI 3114 SATA150 controller> port
0xbc00-0xbc07,0xb400-0xb403,0xb000-0xb007,0xac00-0xac03,0xa800-0xa80f

mem
0xfeafec00-0xfeafefff irq 17 at device 5.0 on pci3
ata2: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata3: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
ata4: <ATA channel 2> on atapci0
ata5: <ATA channel 3> on atapci0
pci3: <display, VGA> at device 6.0 (no driver
attached)
isab0: <PCI-ISA bridge> at device 7.0 on pci0
isa0: <ISA bus> on isab0
atapci1: <AMD 8111 UDMA133 controller> port
0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xffa0-0xffaf at
device 7.1 on pci0
ata0: <ATA channel 0> on atapci1
ata1: <ATA channel 1> on atapci1
pci0: <serial bus, SMBus> at device 7.2 (no driver
attached)
pci0: <bridge> at device 7.3 (no driver attached)
pcib2: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 10.0 on pci0
pci2: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib2

-- SCSI

ahd0: <Adaptec AIC7902 Ultra320 SCSI adapter> port 0x8000-0x80ff,0x7800-0x78ff
mem 0xfc89c000-0xfc89dfff irq 24 at device 10.0 on
pci2
ahd0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
aic7902: Ultra320 Wide Channel A, SCSI Id=7, PCI-X
67-100Mhz, 512 SCBs
ahd1: <Adaptec AIC7902 Ultra320 SCSI adapter> port 0x8800-0x88ff,0x8400-0x84ff
mem 0xfc89e000-0xfc89ffff irq 25 at device 10.1 on
pci2
ahd1: [GIANT-LOCKED]
aic7902: Ultra320 Wide Channel B, SCSI Id=7, PCI-X
67-100Mhz, 512 SCBs
pci0: <base peripheral, interrupt controller> at
device 10.1 (no driver attached)
pcib3: <ACPI PCI-PCI bridge> at device 11.0 on pci0
pci1: <ACPI PCI bus> on pcib3
pci0: <base peripheral, interrupt controller> at
device 11.1 (no driver attached)



Thanks!

Nicole
Ok, so it's an AMD 8111 northbridge versus an Adaptec onboard SCSI controller.

1. What release / version of FreeBSD are you using? You should upgrade to 6.2 STABLE because there have been a variety of issues worked out in previous releases.
2. Do you have any logs for activity during the hours when it locks up (in particular anything interesting / fishy popping up)?
3. What scheduler are you using? 4BSD, ULE?
4. Does your machine (using the SATA controllers) lock up under heavy load? If so, you may have a northbridge cooling issue that you need to put a fan on. For instance, the motherboard that I was using for a while (ASUS P5N-E SLI) was really close to my CPU heatsink, and there was a lot of heat transfer between my northbridge and CPU heatsink, which was raising the onboard temperatures 5~10 degrees C. The new motherboard (ASUS P5B DLX) doesn't do that though.

Cheers,
-Garrett
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