Re: FreeBSD 5.2-RC1 released

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 03:09:08PM +0100, Sten wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Martin Blapp wrote:
> 
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > > Ditto here on SMP i386 (ata), UP alpha (isp) and UP sparc (ata).
> > > However, turning off softupdates on all file systems in the installl results
> > > in a successful install.
> >
> > Disable softupdate doesn't help here.
> 
> It looks, to me at least, like a bug that has been around for a while,
> I got hit by it repeatedly when installing 5.1 on an sparc64 / qlogic isp.
> Turning off softupdates just makes it harder to trigger it, certainly
> not impossible. It looks like a race somewhere that requires specific
> disk speeds / access patterns to trigger.
> 
> I'll try 5.2 and see if it still breaks.
>

I've seen this bug for quite a while now - when I first reported it,
people said it was probably the P4 bug, and asked me to try the PGE
patches.  That didn't work, and I eventually found a way around it.   On
one laptop I tried to install FreeBSD on, it wouldn't even boot without
SpeedStep turned off - it crashed immediately after trying to boot the
kernel.   On another, it would panic when starting to
install packages from the CDROM, with '_mtx_lock_flags_'.  Turning off SpeedStep and thus
throttling the CPU to 60% allowed the install to continue far enough to
get a minimum system installed, but it still paniced if I tried to
install the ports distribution.   After installation, I never again saw
the panic, even when running sysinstall again to install the remaining
distributions.

--
Bruce Cran