ahci causing 8.0R system havoc

[semi-ambivalent]

Up until an hour ago I had a stable 8.0R-p2 amd64 system. On somewhat of a whim I tried loading the ahci module and rebooted. Things come up fine but after about fifteen minutes I get an ugly freeze, then a panic. Single user mode, fsck, umount -a and edit loader.conf to get rid of the ahci load line, and a reboot. Only now the ahci module is loaded anyway and gmirror sees this:

Name Status Components
mirror/sys0 DEGRADED ada1

instead of the expected

Name Status Components
mirror/sys0 DEGRADED ad4
ad6


Because, I imagine, it has been told to look for ad4 and not ada0, so the mirror is not being re-built. Thought I'd try re-editing fstab to boot to one disk and re-declaring it a mirror and then inserting the second disk. The bios is set to use ahci mode for disks but that was never a problem before. Somewhere disk identity has been rewritten to force the adaN scheme rather than adN. So ahci doesn't seem to work on my system but it stinks that it's not as simple to get out of as to fall in to. How can I get out of this? I've got to get this off before things freeze again.

thanks,

sa

[crsd]

How is it loaded 'anyway'? Did you remove ahci line from loader.conf?

[semi-ambivalent]

Yes. Guessing the module is auto-loaded because of prompting by the disk re-naming.

[semi-ambivalent]

I'm currently rebuilding the mirror by doing:

gmirror forget sys0

gmirror insert sys0 ada0

When that completes I'll sync to 8-STABLE and buildworld, etc. There was a post on freebsd-stable@ about a recent rev to the ahci code breaking stuff but that appears to have been corrected. I'll live but can't wait for 8.1R.

sa

[semi-ambivalent]

I had experienced another freeze, this time when mousing through a running youtube video window. So I bounced the box, but prior to the freeze, I had removed a line from loader.conf that loaded the virtualbox driver module and, lo and behold, I could unload the ahci module. After fsck-ing the drives were seen once again as ad4 and ad6.

A little side note is that, right now while gmirror finishes the last 20% of the re-sync, I'm getting 35-43MB per second. While I was using ahci I was getting 67-70MB per second. Prior to the last freeze I had finished a buildworld, so that's going in right now.