FreeBSD 6.1 Open Issues
This is a list of open issues that need to be resolved for FreeBSD 6.1. If you have any updates for this list, please e-mail re@FreeBSD.org.
- Show stopper defects
- Required features
- Desired features
- Documentation Items
- Testing foci
- Problems Discovered by Kernel Stress Test Suite
- Problems specific to the sparc64 architecture
Show stopper defects for 6.1-RELEASE
| Issue | Status | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| No pending issue. | |||
Required features for 6.1-RELEASE
| Issue | Status | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| No pending issue. | |||
Desired features for 6.1-RELEASE
| Issue | Status | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| devfs locking problem | In progress | Jeff Roberson | It is trivial to deadlock it on an SMP system, and there are other panics with device removal. |
| pty leak | In progress | Olivier Houchard | Since 6.x has a hard-coded limit, once all ptys are leaked things like ssh and login no longer work. This seems devfs-related, and occurs only under extreme stress testing, not normal use. |
| swap_pager warnings | Unknown | Don “Truck” Lewis? | When swapfiles are in use, there are often warnings printed: swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: bufobj: 0, blkno: 889347, size: 8192. There is also the possibility of deadlock. |
| unmount pending error | In progress | Suleiman Souhlal | When unmounting filesystems Kris Kennaway reports seeing this warning: /c: unmount pending error: blocks -68512 files 0. This dates back at least to 5.3. It might be associated with filesystem corruption reported by many users in which the 'used' space on a filesystem is negative; fsck -f is needed to correct this. |
| "calcru: runtime went backwards" problem for threaded program | Unknown | stress2 thr1 test can trigger "calcru: runtime went backwards" problem and there are also many similar reports on -stable and -current. Poul-Henning Kamp committed a possible fix (src/sys/kern/kern_tc.c rev.1.169) to update the calibration code to be more precise on 2 March. | |
| NFS data corruption between two 7.0 machines | In progress | Mohan Srinivasan | Running fsx between a 7.0 NFS client and server detects data corruption. This problem can also be reproduced by using 6.1 NFS server. The problem seems to be avoidable by turning off the attribute cache on the NFS client. |
| sort(1) does not work with some locales | Not done | sort(1) can cause a coredump with some locales. See also gnu/93629. | |
| unreliable serial console | Unknown | At the manual 'root mount' prompt, the serial console is very unreliable and drops most characters. This appears to be caused by cngetc() polling the sio driver for input, and the sio driver resetting the chip on every poll iteration. That results in a very small window for it to accept input. Fixing this requires a large review of the operation of the sio driver. The uart driver looks to handle this better and might be a suitable replacement. | |
| fix ntpdate(1) bogus output on amd64. | Unknown | Ollivier Robert | |
| make -jN | Not done | Doing 'make -jN', then suspending/resuming it may result in make reporting it lost child process(es). | |
| update sysinstall disk labeling | In progress | Craig Rodrigues | Sysinstall could use the same fixes recently made to fdisk so it plays nice with GEOM and disk labeling. This does not cause problems during install because nothing on the disk is mounted when its label is being manipulated but it can cause problems if sysinstall gets used on a live system to adjust labels on existing disks which sys-admins tend to do. |
| i386 deadlocks with >16GB swap | Deferred for future release | Alan L. Cox | i386 deadlocks if more than 16GB of swap is in use. Increasing the kern.maxswzone tunable would be a workaround this. Although a patch from Alan L. Cox is needed to allow this variable to be increased, this is not suitable for 6.1R. This limitation should be documented in the Release Notes. |
| panic in bpf | Deferred for future release | Sam Leffler | killing tcpdump (e.g. with ^C) can cause panics in bpf. To fix this problem, some architectural changes are needed. |
| OpenBSM | Deferred for future release | Robert Watson | The integration of OpenBSM is waiting on some final licensing hurdles. It is expected to be available in the next release. |
Documentation items that must be resolved for 6.1
| Issue | Status | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| No pending issue. | |||
Testing foci for 6.1-RELEASE
| Issue | Status | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| manual root mount lockmgr panics | Needs testing | Suleiman Souhlal | Specifying a manual root mount location causes lockmgr panics. Suleiman Souhlal has committed a patch for this. |
| dhclient causes ipv6 panics. | Needs testing | Doug Barton | Doug Barton has more details about this. |
| amd64 panics in ipv6 with date(1) | Needs testing | Hajimu UMEMOTO | amd64 panics in ipv6 when the date is changed using date(1) or ntpdate(1). This may be a MI issue. |
| grep(1) -w does not work with multibyte locales | Needs testing | Tim J. Robbins | grep(1) -w generates wrong results with non-UTF-8 multibyte locales. Tim J. Robbins has committed a patch to -HEAD. See also gnu/91909. |
| Improve kbdmux | Needs testing | Maksim Yevmenkin | From the ideas page. We need this for the growing number of systems that assume that USB is the primary keyboard. Current status appears to be that the kbdmux driver breaks very easily. We need this working well enough where it can be enabled by default, and all attached keyboards Just Work. Maksim Yevmenkin commit kbdmux and rc.d/syscons patches in HEAD and RELENG_6. It is not yet enabled by default. See kbdmux(4) and contact Maksim Yevmenkin if you have problems. |
| umount -f panics | Needs testing | Jeff Roberson, Suleiman Souhlal | panics from race conditions. A patch from Jeff Roberson seems to fix some of them. |
| quota deadlocks | Needs testing | Jeff Roberson | Quota support is not locked properly and causes deadlocks. A patch from Jeff Roberson seems to fix some of them. |
| ifconfig regression on 6.x | Needs testing | Yar Tikhiy | ifconfig cannot handle vlan and mtu parameters at the same time after rev.1.7.2.3 of sbin/ifconfig/ifvlan.c commit. For more information and a proposed patch, see bin/94028. |
| SMP kernels for install | Needs testing | Sam Leffler | From the ideas page. Right now we only install a UP kernel, for performance reasons. We should be able to package both a UP and SMP kernel into the release bits, and have sysinstall install both. It should also select the correct one for the target system and make that the default on boot. The easiest way to do this would be to have sysinstall boot an SMP kernel and then look at the hw.ncpu sysctl. The only problem is being able to have sysinstall fall back to booting a UP kernel for itself if the SMP one fails. This can probably be 'faked' by setting one of the SMP-disabling variables in the loader. But in any case, the point is to make the process Just Work for the user, without the user needing to know arcane loader/sysctl knobs. SMP laptops are here, and we should be ready to support SMP out-of-the-box. |
| dup(2) regression on 6.x | Needs testing | Christian S.J. Peron | Simple "close(0); dup(fd)" does not return descriptor "0" in some cases. This problem has been reported in kern/87208, and there is a proposed patch in the PR, too. Christian S.J. Peron has committed a fix for this. |
| cpu_ipi_selected() can cause a trap on FreeBSD/sparc64 | Needs testing | Marius Strobl | On sparc64, cpu_ipi_selected() can cause a trap (which is bad since it appears in the trap code path). |
| UFS deadlocks on amd64 | Needs testing | Tor Egge | Seen by Kris Kennaway. This problem seems MI. |
| UFS deadlocks | Needs testing | Tor Egge | Seen by Peter Jeremy. |
| panic in fxp driver | Needs testing | Andre Oppermann | See http://people.freebsd.org/~pho/stress/log/cons186.html. |
| exec_map depletion | Needs testing | Stephan Uphoff | The exec_map is regularly running out of space on machines running 7.0. Stephan Uphoff has a committed a patch that seems to fix this problem. |
| /dev/mem instability | Needs testing | Marius Strobl, Stephan Uphoff | Instability when accessing /dev/mem. A fix was committed for i386. amd64 does not seem to have the problem. A sparc64 fix is still in progress. |
| deadlock in vn_start_write() consumers | Needs testing | Tor Egge | Many potential deadlocks have been fixed. |
Stress Test Panics
The system is continuously being subjected to Peter Holm's Kernel Stress Test Suite. The following issues have recently been discovered from this test suite.
sparc64 problems
These are problems that range in severity for FreeBSD/sparc64. They will not hold up the release, but they will still be tracked for future releases.
| Issue | Status | Responsible | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| sparc64 frequent hangs | In progress | Marius Strobl | Some of the more serious hangs on sparc64 have been fixed, but more remain. |
| serious sparc64 IPv6 panic | In progress | George V. Neville-Neil | Triggered by just ping6'ing the box. It may even be a MI issue, the reporter of this bug only uses IPv6 with sparc64. This problem seems to be triggered even when debug.mpsafenet="0". |
| swap panic on sparc64 | Unknown | Kris Kennaway has panic info | Kris Kennaway reports configuring a 74GB swap-backed md on sparc64 that caused a panic after a week or two of load (during which time swap was slowly filling as more of the md was dirtied). |
| KLDs on sparc64 | Not done | On sparc64 machines with more than 4Gb memory KLDs are not usable and will panic the system. The problem is reportedly with how the KLDs are compiled, it only works if the code ends up below 4G. | |
| Max RAM on sparc64 | Not done | Maximum RAM on sparc64 appears to be limited to 16Gb. |
Last modified on: May 15, 2021 by Allan Jude