freebsd stable - Feb 2010 - Strange problem with 8-stable, VMWare vSphere 4 & AMD CPUs (unexpected shutdowns)

It looks like I've stumbled upon a bug in vSphere 4 (recent update) with 
FreeBSD/amd64 8.0/8-stable (but not 7.x) guests on Opteron(s). In this 
combination, everything works fine until a moderate load is started - a 
buildworld is enough. About five minutes after the load starts, the 
vSphere client starts getting timeouts while talking with the host and 
soon after the guest VM is forcibly shut down without any trace of a 
reason in various logs. The same VM runs fine on hosts with Xeon CPUs. 
The shutdown happens regardless if there is a vSphere client connected.

This is very repeatable, on Sun Fire X4140 hosts.

With 7.x/7.stable guests everything works fine.

I'm posting this for future reference and to see if anyone has 
encountered something like that, or has an idea why this happens.

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, Ivan Voras wrote:
> It looks like I've stumbled upon a bug in vSphere 4 (recent update) 
> with FreeBSD/amd64 8.0/8-stable (but not 7.x) guests on Opteron(s). In 
> this combination, everything works fine until a moderate load is 
> started - a buildworld is enough. About five minutes after the load 
> starts, the vSphere client starts getting timeouts while talking with 
> the host and soon after the guest VM is forcibly shut down without any 
> trace of a reason in various logs.  The same VM runs fine on hosts 
> with Xeon CPUs. The shutdown happens regardless if there is a vSphere 
> client connected.
>
> This is very repeatable, on Sun Fire X4140 hosts.
>
> With 7.x/7.stable guests everything works fine.
>
> I'm posting this for future reference and to see if anyone has 
> encountered something like that, or has an idea why this happens.
Is it related to this thread:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-February/054755.html

I have been fighting other issues (mainly countless "Command WRITE(10) 
took X.XYZ seconds" in the VM's vmware.log file under moderate I/O)
with
VMware Workstation 7 on a Linux host with an AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 945 
Processor, but I still have more testing to see if I can work through 
it.  I also do not want to take over this thread.

Sean
-- 
scf@FreeBSD.org

on 10/02/2010 17:36 Ivan Voras said the following:
> It looks like I've stumbled upon a bug in vSphere 4 (recent update)
with
> FreeBSD/amd64 8.0/8-stable (but not 7.x) guests on Opteron(s). In this
> combination, everything works fine until a moderate load is started - a
> buildworld is enough. About five minutes after the load starts, the
> vSphere client starts getting timeouts while talking with the host and
> soon after the guest VM is forcibly shut down without any trace of a
> reason in various logs. The same VM runs fine on hosts with Xeon CPUs.
> The shutdown happens regardless if there is a vSphere client connected.
> 
> This is very repeatable, on Sun Fire X4140 hosts.
> 
> With 7.x/7.stable guests everything works fine.
> 
> I'm posting this for future reference and to see if anyone has
> encountered something like that, or has an idea why this happens.
Wild guess - try disabling superpages in the guests.

-- 
Andriy Gapon