I recently migrated all three of my systems from Gentoo Linux to FreeBSD 7.1. I did so in part because of the vaunted reliability of FreeBSD, as well as the performance claims and the maturity of the system. Needless to say, I was more than a bit disappointed to leave my home office for a few minutes and upon returning, discovering that my primary machine (a Thinkpad X61, 2 Gb memory, 100 Gb 7200 rpm disk) had rebooted itself. No core dump, nothing in /var/log/messages that would provide a clue as to what happened. I am running the stock 7.1 kernel.
The one thing I was doing that was different from my activities of the last weeks since the conversion (during which the system has crashed three other times due to a bug in the ext2 filesystem support -- a bit hard to understand, given the maturity of the Linux implementation -- for which I have a patch that is uninstalled, since I'd need to build a kernel), was that I was doing a copy of a large number of files from my primary backup disk to the secondary disk. Both are SATA drives in USB shoeboxes and both filesystems are UFS (no journal, no soft updates). I was also disappointed to find that I had to fsck both of the backup filesystems on rebooting before I could mount them and there were a significant number of errors on the drive to which I was copying. I thought the synchronous updates of the filesystem metadata in UFS were supposed to avoid leaving a filesystem in an inconsistent state? That was certainly not the case here. Perhaps I've misunderstood what I've read about this filesystem.
Anyway, I'm asking for ideas for how to look for evidence as to what might have caused this crash. I've used Linux for *years* and would be hard-pressed to remember even a single complete system crash. If this is par for the course with FreeBSD, then clearly I've made a major mistake in using it, which can be undone. I'd much prefer to continue with this system, but I need to understand what's going on here, because four system crashes in two weeks was not what I bargained for when I made this move.
/Don Allen
The one thing I was doing that was different from my activities of the last weeks since the conversion (during which the system has crashed three other times due to a bug in the ext2 filesystem support -- a bit hard to understand, given the maturity of the Linux implementation -- for which I have a patch that is uninstalled, since I'd need to build a kernel), was that I was doing a copy of a large number of files from my primary backup disk to the secondary disk. Both are SATA drives in USB shoeboxes and both filesystems are UFS (no journal, no soft updates). I was also disappointed to find that I had to fsck both of the backup filesystems on rebooting before I could mount them and there were a significant number of errors on the drive to which I was copying. I thought the synchronous updates of the filesystem metadata in UFS were supposed to avoid leaving a filesystem in an inconsistent state? That was certainly not the case here. Perhaps I've misunderstood what I've read about this filesystem.
Anyway, I'm asking for ideas for how to look for evidence as to what might have caused this crash. I've used Linux for *years* and would be hard-pressed to remember even a single complete system crash. If this is par for the course with FreeBSD, then clearly I've made a major mistake in using it, which can be undone. I'd much prefer to continue with this system, but I need to understand what's going on here, because four system crashes in two weeks was not what I bargained for when I made this move.
/Don Allen