I tried FreeBSD a year or so ago and abandoned it after it was clear that the USB layer was hopeless (I do my backups to SATA disks in USB shoeboxes). So, the arrival of release 8, with its re-written USB layer, was an invitation to give it another try. Unfortunately, I think things are still broken in USB-land, differently.
A bit of context: I have an HP desktop (AMD dual-core Athlon, 2 Gb of memory, 320 Gb SATA drive) and a Lenovo S10 workstation (Intel quad-core, 4 Gb of memory, 2 146 Gb SAS disks on an LSI raid card setup in a raid 0 array). The two machines share usb keyboard, usb mouse, monitor, sound equipment, and a usb hub via a Raritan KVM. The USB backup disks are plugged into the hub. I run OpenBSD on the HP machine and I was running FreeBSD on the workstation (that machine is used for intensive database work and I was concerned about possible performance issues with OpenBSD and its coarse-grained locking approach to SMP, otherwise I'd run OpenBSD on that machine, too, because I've had an extremely good experience with it during the last year; the system is extremely stable and very easy to administer and upgrade). I say "was", because I have stopped using FreeBSD again, because of the problems I will describe below. My environment on both machines is set up identically as far as X is concerned -- no desktop, just dwm/dmenu. The installed packages are very much the same.
Symptom 1: I was using the workstation, (so, of course, the KVM was pointed at it), running a fairly newly installed FreeBSD 8.0 and one of the backup drives was spinning, but not mounted (it had been mounted and I umounted it). I physically pulled the disk's connector out of the USB hub, at which point both my mouse and keyboard became inoperative. The system had not crashed, but it was unusable, and I had to ssh in from another machine to reboot it.
Symptom 2: If I am using the workstation and I point the KVM at the HP machine and then return to the workstation, the mouse is frozen, every time. dwm keyboard commands don't work either, but ctrl-alt-delete reboots the system.
Another, issue that I noticed this morning was that I did a freebsd-update fetch followed by a freebsd-update install. After rebooting, the system was very unresponsive. Clicking on tabs or links in Firefox resulted in very sluggish responses. Getting an xterm fired up to try to see what was going on took forever. I managed to run 'top' finally, the output of which looked like an idle machine -- low load averages, negligible processor utilization, nothing much of anything going on. At that point, I'd had enough, and I'm in the process of installing Arch Linux.
I'll submit formal bug reports about all this, but I'm curious if anyone else has observed symptoms anything like what I am describing above. Or perhaps has some idea of what's going on?
/Don Allen
A bit of context: I have an HP desktop (AMD dual-core Athlon, 2 Gb of memory, 320 Gb SATA drive) and a Lenovo S10 workstation (Intel quad-core, 4 Gb of memory, 2 146 Gb SAS disks on an LSI raid card setup in a raid 0 array). The two machines share usb keyboard, usb mouse, monitor, sound equipment, and a usb hub via a Raritan KVM. The USB backup disks are plugged into the hub. I run OpenBSD on the HP machine and I was running FreeBSD on the workstation (that machine is used for intensive database work and I was concerned about possible performance issues with OpenBSD and its coarse-grained locking approach to SMP, otherwise I'd run OpenBSD on that machine, too, because I've had an extremely good experience with it during the last year; the system is extremely stable and very easy to administer and upgrade). I say "was", because I have stopped using FreeBSD again, because of the problems I will describe below. My environment on both machines is set up identically as far as X is concerned -- no desktop, just dwm/dmenu. The installed packages are very much the same.
Symptom 1: I was using the workstation, (so, of course, the KVM was pointed at it), running a fairly newly installed FreeBSD 8.0 and one of the backup drives was spinning, but not mounted (it had been mounted and I umounted it). I physically pulled the disk's connector out of the USB hub, at which point both my mouse and keyboard became inoperative. The system had not crashed, but it was unusable, and I had to ssh in from another machine to reboot it.
Symptom 2: If I am using the workstation and I point the KVM at the HP machine and then return to the workstation, the mouse is frozen, every time. dwm keyboard commands don't work either, but ctrl-alt-delete reboots the system.
Another, issue that I noticed this morning was that I did a freebsd-update fetch followed by a freebsd-update install. After rebooting, the system was very unresponsive. Clicking on tabs or links in Firefox resulted in very sluggish responses. Getting an xterm fired up to try to see what was going on took forever. I managed to run 'top' finally, the output of which looked like an idle machine -- low load averages, negligible processor utilization, nothing much of anything going on. At that point, I'd had enough, and I'm in the process of installing Arch Linux.
I'll submit formal bug reports about all this, but I'm curious if anyone else has observed symptoms anything like what I am describing above. Or perhaps has some idea of what's going on?
/Don Allen