Updated today to latest snap - very slow
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Hi there,
1st post and all…
I had a stable 2.0.1 install on a Watchguard X700.Today i took the plunge and installed the latest nanobsd snapshot (pfSense-2.1-DEVELOPMENT-4g-i386-nanobsd-20120410-2009)
Everything looks ok, problem is, whenever I change any setting it takes almost a minute to write the change, which is driving me crazy. Any pointers on where to pinpoint the issue?
It's installed on a 4G CF card, which previously was working perfectly.
Edit: also played around in /boot/loader.conf
tried setting hw.ata.wc to 1 (to enable write cache), still nothing. Can anyone confirm what's the setting on 2.0.1 for that?looks like reads AND writes are slow (doing an ls via ssh takes 20 seconds just to list a directory)
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yes. PF web GUI run slow some version. you may try v2.1. ;)
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I found this as well, clicking through the web interface is a lot faster than it used to be but as soon as you make a change it takes ages to commit the change while the hdd/storage light is on permanently!
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jp141 , are you also running on a Watchguard box?
This is very strange because previously it was very fast doing writes
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Hi Yeah its a X550e IIRC
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I had this problem a while back with my X-Peak box, not with 2.1, after upgrading it went away I never got to the bottom of it.
Anyway (assuming you are running NanoBSD) when you commit a change the file system is remounted RW, the change is written then the file system is remounted back to RO.
How long does it take to issue these command manually?[2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(1): mount -p /dev/ufs/pfsense0 / ufs ro,sync,noatime 1 1 devfs /dev devfs rw 0 0 /dev/md0 /tmp ufs rw 2 2 /dev/md1 /var ufs rw 2 2 /dev/ufs/cf /cf ufs ro,sync,noatime 1 1 devfs /var/dhcpd/dev devfs rw 0 0 [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(2): /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(3): mount -p /dev/ufs/pfsense0 / ufs sync,noatime 1 1 devfs /dev devfs rw 0 0 /dev/md0 /tmp ufs rw 2 2 /dev/md1 /var ufs rw 2 2 /dev/ufs/cf /cf ufs sync,noatime 1 1 devfs /var/dhcpd/dev devfs rw 0 0 [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(4): /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro [2.0.1-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(5): mount -p /dev/ufs/pfsense0 / ufs ro,sync,noatime 1 1 devfs /dev devfs rw 0 0 /dev/md0 /tmp ufs rw 2 2 /dev/md1 /var ufs rw 2 2 /dev/ufs/cf /cf ufs ro,sync,noatime 1 1 devfs /var/dhcpd/dev devfs rw 0 0I included the 'mount -p' so you can see what should happen. On my 2.0.1 box the remounting is pretty much instant but when I had the 'issue' it could take 30s or more.
Steve
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Just to add another voice: very slow UI on an Alix setup. Using snapshot from this morning : built on Mon Apr 16 03:28:01 EDT 2012
It's whenever there is a change to be committed. I've had to avoid HTTPS, because then it seems to timeout even.
I can honestly say it is some sort of "disk" IO, as the mount command is super slow in an SSH session during any change.
Update with yesterday's late build, commands run this morning :
[2.1-DEVELOPMENT][root@h.s.com]/root(16): time mount -uw /
0.000u 0.006s 0:00.01 0.0% 0+0k 0+5io 0pf+0w
[2.1-DEVELOPMENT][root@h.s.com]/root(17): time mount -ur /
0.008u 0.025s 0:50.49 0.0% 64+3036k 0+722io 0pf+0w
[2.1-DEVELOPMENT][root@h.s.com]/root(18):
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-> stephenw10, indeed I am running the NanoBSD version.
I've tried running the commands from ssh, mount_rw was instant, mount_ro took around 20 seconds.Does this seem to point to the problem then? Does anyone know of a workaround?
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Is this the only snapshot any of you have tried?
It would be useful to try and get some idea when this problem was introduced.
I'm not running 2.1 at all currently but the last snapshot I tried, some months ago, did not exhibit this behaviour.Steve
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Things are smooth/snappy on my ALIX with a snapshot from today, I've not seen this slowness myself. Saving does take about 6-7 seconds but it always has on ALIX.
Using HTTPS to get to the GUI, everything seems happy.
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I'll update to the latest in 10 min, but this version from last night is already 30 seconds on the Traffic Shaper Wizard's first "Next".
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On Latest : built on Tue Apr 17 12:13:03 EDT 2012
simple test using latest Chrome browser 18.0.1025.163
- System Advanced -> (select) -> Enable Secure Shell -> Save
3 minutes, 23 seconds for it to return
I revert the change and Save
3 minutes, 31 seconds for it to return
I think I will test another browser, just in case. Then I may disassemble the Alix, remove the flash card and re-install the 2.1 as a test again.
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I did that same test on my alix on the same snapshot, ~16 seconds to enable/disable SSH. Though I'm in Firefox, not that it should make that large of a difference.
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this maybe largely dependent on the speed and quality of the CF card.
I have a CF card in one of my Alix systems that will timeout any attempt to upgrade the firmware because the 4GB CF card is just so bad.
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Agreed,
though here we are comparing performance from 2.0.1 stable to 2.1 on the same hardware. On 2.0.1 everything was lighting fast. On 2.1, routing / firewalling performance is good, the only problem is when changing settings.
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Whilst I agree that the speed of the card will make some difference I have a hard time believing that any card should take over 3 minutes to remount.
I have never detected any difference between cards of wildly varying 'quality' with regards to boot time or remounting. Since NanoBSD disables DMA they all run at PIO speeds anyway hence '133X' or '300X' claimed card speeds are irrelevant.Is 2.1 still disabling DMA correctly? Does it need to for FreeBSD 8.3?
Any power saving 'spin down' type options enabled?
Steve
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Is 2.1 still disabling DMA correctly? Does it need to for FreeBSD 8.3?
That hasn't changed
Any power saving 'spin down' type options enabled?
No, in fact we actually force APM off now since otherwise some silly HDDs will kill themselves with load cycles. (But that's only done if the drive reports that feature as supported)
Either way - those two types of things would be fairly universal, they would affect everyone. It wouldn't be fast for me and slow for you.
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Agreed.
Perhaps a combination of pfSense and BIOS options then?
Though that wouldn't account for introducing the problem by simply switching to 2.1.
Config slice become corrupt or fragmented somehow? :-\Steve
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Looking around in /boot/loader.conf defaults again… I'm no BSD expert by a longshot, I've read that increasing the kmem size reduces the change of a kernel panic.
vm.kmem_size="435544320"
vm.kmem_size_max="535544320"That size looks like 415Mb, and my firewall is running with 256Mb of RAM, could it be related??
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Sorry for the late reply, but working on the Alix meant I had no Internet.
Tests were done:
- zero the 4GB card, re-image 2.1 from yesterday, re-test : same sluggish results
- take the 2GB card that came with the units, image it with 2.1, re-test : same result
- re-image 4GB card with 2.0.1 : smooth as butter, fast. 9 seconds to enable SSH, 8 seconds to disable
I posit something IO related is very wonky.
Sadly, until my 2nd Alix is back in my hands, I shall have to remain at 2.0.1
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Hello!
Tested with ALIX.2 v0.99h board and 8GB CF and got the same results as barista:
"Build on Tue Apr 17:30:20 EDT 2012" - DHCP on WAN interface does not work, setting up something takes forever (some minutes to get a respond)
connected via serial console running top - system is idle but I tried to reboot via Web-GUI and tried to start top via serial console and I was not able to start top. Looks like the system got hung for minutes then get back to normal work (top starts in console and I got the shutdown message but the system does not shutdown so I unplug the power).After reboot I switched the slice (lasting for minutes…) I rebooted (once again waiting minutes ...could not wait ... unplugged power)
"Build on Mon Apr 16 08:51:47 EDT 2012" - WAN got an IP via DHCP but changing configuration takes a long timeboth builds take a long time to configure WAN but the damaged takes a lot longer.
At the moment im updating to "build Wed Apr 18 18:57:19 EDT 2012" - reporting later.
Bye,
eweri
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Timings from 2 of my Alix 2D13 256MB systems for "mount -uw /" and "mount -ur /":
a) 2.1-DEVELOPMENT (i386)
built on Wed Mar 28 20:25:36 EDT 2012
FreeBSD 8.3-RC2
Both mounts are quick (0:00.04 then 0:01.27)b) 2.1-DEVELOPMENT (i386)
built on Mon Apr 16 16:52:53 EDT 2012
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE
"mount -uw /" is quick (even reporting 0:00.00)
"mount -ur /" is always around 1:02.00 (4 samples between 1 minute and 1:05.00)I also tried "mount -ufr /" in tghe hope that the "force" flag might make force something to close that was accidentally open or whatever, it made no difference to the timing.
Is this a feature of 8.3-RELEASE?
Can others confirm if the issue is only on 8.3-RELEASE builds?
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Okay here are my results with "build on Wed 18 18:57:19 EDT 2012":
WAN does not get an IP-address via DHCP, configuration changes takes a very long time to complete.
I tried to reboot via Web-GUI and this is what i got from serial console (it hung for a long time):
Apr 19 09:45:43 init: timeout expired for /bin/sh on /etc/rc.shutdown: Interrupted system call; going to single user mode
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system processvnlru' to stop…donep Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system processbufdaemon' to stop...done
Waiting (max 60 seconds) for system process `syncer' to stop... shHope this helps,
eweri
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: cat /etc/version 2.1-DEVELOPMENT : cat /etc/nanosize.txt 4g : cat /etc/version.buildtime Tue Apr 17 06:39:44 EDT 2012 : uname -a FreeBSD alix.pingle.org 8.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE #0: Tue Apr 17 06:39:26 EDT 2012 root@FreeBSD_8.3_pfSense_2.1.snaps.pfsense.org:/usr/obj./usr/pfSensesrc/src/sys/pfSense_wrap.8.i386 i386 : time mount -uw / 0.000u 0.006s 0:00.00 0.0% 0+0k 0+5io 0pf+0w : time mount -ur / 0.005u 0.015s 0:01.76 0.5% 64+2680k 0+578io 0pf+0wDHCP WAN works fine for me, as does IPv6 and such.
What packages are installed on the ones having issues? I have none installed.
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Update or fresh install might be pertinent here.
Steve
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That's possible. I've got a ton of CF's around, I'll image a new one and swap it in, see what happens.
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My test system with 8.3-RELEASE also had Squid and SquidGuard packages running. For some reason, between "Configuring WAN interface" and "Configuring LAN interface", Squid processes would start. Then later the package startup would also start Squid. There is some sort of double-startup of Squid with the current 2.1-DEVELOPMENT and whatever is happening with the PBI installation process - I will look at that later and start another thread for it.
I removed SquidGuard and Squid.
Now "mount -uw /" is instant (as always) and "mount -ur /" is about 2 seconds.
My 8.3-RC2 snapshot didn't have any packages installed, so that seems to be why it is fast to mount read-only.
After adding packages (at least PBIs like Squid/SquidGuard) the time to mount read-only increases substantially.
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The freshly imaged card was indeed much slower, taking ~30 seconds to mount ro for me.
I don't think it's FreeBSD 8.3 in general though, there were other changes made to how the nanobsd images are generated which could be contributing.
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Things are smooth/snappy on my ALIX with a snapshot from today, I've not seen this slowness myself. Saving does take about 6-7 seconds but it always has on ALIX.
Using HTTPS to get to the GUI, everything seems happy.
I have a soekris 4801 (and a couple of 4501's, but not enough ram). Works fine with 2.0.1, but every 2.1 snapshot I've tried in the last week or two exhibits the stall problem.
A number of people have mentioned shell commands like 'ls' hanging etc. If you type ^T (ctrl T) during one of these stalls you'll see that the process is waiting on suspfs, which is one of two functions in kern/vfs_vnops.c (both vn_start_write and vn_start_secondary_write call msleep with the same wmesg string. usually the wait message is unique so that there is no confusion which [tm]sleep we're waiting in. I think this is a bug in itself and the msleep in vn_start_secondary_write should be changed to "suspf2" or something similar to differentiate it ).
Anyway, seeing that processes are stalling in either of these functions leads you back to the mount updates being the cause. If you run /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro from a shell, followed by /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw I see a stall on the second command everytime. ^T reports that the mount process is waiting on biowr.
I put some logging into /etc/inc/config.lib.php (where conf_mount_ro and rw function reside) to determine which of the 4 mount updates was stalling (syslog conveniently timestamps the messages) and it's the read only mount update of /. On my system it's a stall of between 107 and 110 seconds.
I can't reproduce the behaviour using the same image under virtualbox.
The CF card in this 4801 is a cheap card with a brand I had not heard of, I'm going to try a sandisk card when I can find it.
- Mark
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Recently we changed the builder to use conv=sparse when making image files to save time/space on the builders. Not sure if that's related, but I backed it out today. We'll have to wait and see if the snapshots from tomorrow, when freshly imaged, work better.
I never did have a problem with my card that I had running 2.0.1 and firmware upgraded to 2.1. Only with a fresh image.
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jimp, I guess that means tomorrow when new images are created a full re-flash is in order right?
Can you let us know when we can test? (weekend coming up, good opportunity) :)
thanks !
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I never did have a problem with my card that I had running 2.0.1 and firmware upgraded to 2.1. Only with a fresh image.
On my system it's exactly the other way around. The fresh image (same snapshot) is much faster. Although it might also be the CF card which I replaced from 1G to 4G. The datarate while downloading a snapshot increased from 20kbps up to 500kbps, and any saving operation only takes a few seconds again.
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Things are smooth/snappy on my ALIX with a snapshot from today, I've not seen this slowness myself. Saving does take about 6-7 seconds but it always has on ALIX.
Using HTTPS to get to the GUI, everything seems happy.
I have a soekris 4801 (and a couple of 4501's, but not enough ram). Works fine with 2.0.1, but every 2.1 snapshot I've tried in the last week or two exhibits the stall problem.
A number of people have mentioned shell commands like 'ls' hanging etc. If you type ^T (ctrl T) during one of these stalls you'll see that the process is waiting on suspfs, which is one of two functions in kern/vfs_vnops.c (both vn_start_write and vn_start_secondary_write call msleep with the same wmesg string. usually the wait message is unique so that there is no confusion which [tm]sleep we're waiting in. I think this is a bug in itself and the msleep in vn_start_secondary_write should be changed to "suspf2" or something similar to differentiate it ).
Anyway, seeing that processes are stalling in either of these functions leads you back to the mount updates being the cause. If you run /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro from a shell, followed by /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw I see a stall on the second command everytime. ^T reports that the mount process is waiting on biowr.
I put some logging into /etc/inc/config.lib.php (where conf_mount_ro and rw function reside) to determine which of the 4 mount updates was stalling (syslog conveniently timestamps the messages) and it's the read only mount update of /. On my system it's a stall of between 107 and 110 seconds.
I can't reproduce the behaviour using the same image under virtualbox.
The CF card in this 4801 is a cheap card with a brand I had not heard of, I'm going to try a sandisk card when I can find it.
- Mark
I forgot to say that this is likely a race condition, probably triggered by the longer flash write time. It sounds to me very similar to
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=149022
which apparently was seen on normal drives under heavy load. The bug wasn't resolved and was closed due to lack of feedback.
There was a query about whether a fix to the soft-update code fixed it.
Soft-updates aren't enabled on the flash device. However I did try enabling soft-updates just to see if a change in the write timing might work around the issue I was seeing.Would be much easier to debug if I could get a 2.1 build environment working, but that's the topic of another post…
"show mount" from the kernel debugger would be very interesting.
- Mark
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Recently we changed the builder to use conv=sparse when making image files to save time/space on the builders. Not sure if that's related, but I backed it out today. We'll have to wait and see if the snapshots from tomorrow, when freshly imaged, work better.
I noticed something different, which may be related.
In the create_nanobsd_diskimage (), a change was made to the zeroing of the nanobsd image:
dd if=/dev/zero of=${IMG} bs=${NANO_SECTS}b
count=0 seek=`expr ${NANO_MEDIASIZE} / ${NANO_SECTS}That did not really do anything.
Later on, the dd command was used to write the image, with "conv=sparse". I don't think it matters at this time, since the image probably contains a lot of garbage.
We changed it back for our purposes, since we build 8G and 16GB nanobsd images and we can't compress them to reasonable sizes.
dd if=/dev/zero of=${IMG} bs=${NANO_SECTS}b
count=`expr ${NANO_MEDIASIZE} / ${NANO_SECTS}On another note, the last patch from ermalluci broke the build process in the last couple of days. We made changes by hands to the headers to get it going again, i.e.
From
….....
diff --git a/sys/netinet/ip_carp.c b/sys/netinet/ip_carp.c
index a4890dd..5b5fb19 100644
--- a/sys/netinet/ip_carp.c
+++ b/sys/netinet/ip_carp.c
.........
To
.........
Index: sys/netinet/ip_carp.c--- sys/netinet/ip_carp.c
+++ sys/netinet/ip_carp.c
.........
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the count=0 and seek=number means we don't actually write the image out with zeros to disk.
When reading the file it will have the correct size and everything will be returned as 0.
But you don't actually write an entire 4-16GB file. So it's much faster.
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On another note, the last patch from ermalluci broke the build process in the last couple of days. We made changes by hands to the headers to get it going again, i.e.
The latest updates seems to have fixed the issue. I ran through the patches and they seem to be fine now. I am going to complete a build tonight and I am guessing the build servers will also produce a snapshot sometime later tonight.
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So.. I've updated to snapshot 2.1-DEVELOPMENT (i386) built on Fri Apr 20 22:46:42 EDT 2012, however I did not re-flash, just update from the Webif
Speed is still the same (slow).
Should I do a full re-image to see if this got fixed?
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I ran mine as an update, but, I had just completed a clean install. I would backup and re-image to to make sure there is nothing holding you back.
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Alix 2D13, 2G CF card
2.1-DEVELOPMENT (i386)
built on Mon Apr 23 08:11:16 EDT 2012
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASEI just flashed this current build to a CF card.
"mount -uw /" and "mount -ur /" are both <<1 second straight after a basic wizard setup.
After installing cron, pfblocker, squid and squidguard, "mount -ur /" is 10 to 15 seconds - I guess it is doing some extra thinking about all the files that are open on "/" before switching it to read-only.I am also wondering about the mount state of "/" immediately after boot. I had assumed it would be mounted read-only, but if I use the webGUI Diagnostics, Command Prompt to do "mount -v" then this is what is displayed:
$ mount -v
/dev/ufs/pfsense0 on / (ufs, local, noatime, synchronous, fsid c050954f24ebab91)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, fsid 00ff000303000000)
/dev/md0 on /tmp (ufs, local, fsid 8843964f53e8126e)
/dev/md1 on /var (ufs, local, fsid 8843964f5d6ec7d7)
/dev/ufs/cf on /cf (ufs, local, noatime, synchronous, fsid 0758954f63bcd04b)
devfs on /var/dhcpd/dev (devfs, local, fsid 01ff000303000000)No read-only to be seen.
Same thing if a access the console, option 8 "Shell" and "mount -v".
Is this expected? Maybe the code that does the commands or drops to the shell enables write before giving control to the user command?
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Things are smooth/snappy on my ALIX with a snapshot from today, I've not seen this slowness myself. Saving does take about 6-7 seconds but it always has on ALIX.
Using HTTPS to get to the GUI, everything seems happy.
I have a soekris 4801 (and a couple of 4501's, but not enough ram). Works fine with 2.0.1, but every 2.1 snapshot I've tried in the last week or two exhibits the stall problem.
A number of people have mentioned shell commands like 'ls' hanging etc. If you type ^T (ctrl T) during one of these stalls you'll see that the process is waiting on suspfs, which is one of two functions in kern/vfs_vnops.c (both vn_start_write and vn_start_secondary_write call msleep with the same wmesg string. usually the wait message is unique so that there is no confusion which [tm]sleep we're waiting in. I think this is a bug in itself and the msleep in vn_start_secondary_write should be changed to "suspf2" or something similar to differentiate it ).
Anyway, seeing that processes are stalling in either of these functions leads you back to the mount updates being the cause. If you run /etc/rc.conf_mount_ro from a shell, followed by /etc/rc.conf_mount_rw I see a stall on the second command everytime. ^T reports that the mount process is waiting on biowr.
I put some logging into /etc/inc/config.lib.php (where conf_mount_ro and rw function reside) to determine which of the 4 mount updates was stalling (syslog conveniently timestamps the messages) and it's the read only mount update of /. On my system it's a stall of between 107 and 110 seconds.
I can't reproduce the behaviour using the same image under virtualbox.
The CF card in this 4801 is a cheap card with a brand I had not heard of, I'm going to try a sandisk card when I can find it.
- Mark
I forgot to say that this is likely a race condition, probably triggered by the longer flash write time. It sounds to me very similar to
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=149022
which apparently was seen on normal drives under heavy load. The bug wasn't resolved and was closed due to lack of feedback.
There was a query about whether a fix to the soft-update code fixed it.
Soft-updates aren't enabled on the flash device. However I did try enabling soft-updates just to see if a change in the write timing might work around the issue I was seeing.Would be much easier to debug if I could get a 2.1 build environment working, but that's the topic of another post…
"show mount" from the kernel debugger would be very interesting.
- Mark
Well after way too much messing around, and finally abandoning the prebuilt developer ova virtual image, starting with a fresh install of freebsd 8.3 worked far simpler.
I upgraded my soekris 4801 to my first self built upgrade test image (from build_nano.sh). That worked fine, but still exhibits the stall condition.
Then I tweaked build_nano.sh so that I had a ddb enabled kernel (i.e. call build_embedded_dev_kernel instead of build_embedded_kernel).
This kernel sees the same issues. show mount is indeed very interesting. There are way way more secondary writes happening than I'd expect on a quiescent filesystem. I haven't had time to look at this in depth, but it kind of looks like every open vnode is resulting in an update write of the inode, despite the fact noasync is set… It's been a bit problematic investigating as show mount root produces so much output that it uncovered a bug in the usb serial interface driver I use to to connect to the 4801 (generic prolific usb device, the osx driver seems to not handle overruns very well).After poking around a little in the kernel debugger, I finally got around to trying the exact same image on a sandisk flash card (by dd'ing from the cheapo card to the sandisk card). Interestingly enough, there were no stalls going from read only to read write when I was using the (higher spec) sandisk flash. I speculated earlier that this seemed like a race condition, this seems to confirm at least that timing is an important factor.
Many have also suggested that there's a difference in behaviour between an upgrade an a fresh install of the flash card. I doubt it actually has any impact, but I'll run that test tomorrow on the cheapo card to eliminate/confirm it.
- Mark
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I only had the problem with a full fresh image. I haven't tried a new one yet, but I can write out the exact same CF I had problems with.
Alix 2D13, 2G CF card
2.1-DEVELOPMENT (i386)
built on Mon Apr 23 08:11:16 EDT 2012
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASEI just flashed this current build to a CF card.
"mount -uw /" and "mount -ur /" are both <<1 second straight after a basic wizard setup.
After installing cron, pfblocker, squid and squidguard, "mount -ur /" is 10 to 15 seconds - I guess it is doing some extra thinking about all the files that are open on "/" before switching it to read-only.So you're saying that, on the same CF card that was slow with previous images, it's now fast with a new fresh image?
I am also wondering about the mount state of "/" immediately after boot. I had assumed it would be mounted read-only, but if I use the webGUI Diagnostics, Command Prompt to do "mount -v" then this is what is displayed:
No read-only to be seen.
Same thing if a access the console, option 8 "Shell" and "mount -v".
Is this expected? Maybe the code that does the commands or drops to the shell enables write before giving control to the user command?
Diag > Command does switch to rw. The shell does not. However, some packages can monkey with what happens there… In particular, after a firmware update that reinstalls packages, often you have to reboot after the update before it goes to ro properly.
