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Date:      Sun, 22 Jun 2014 16:56:39 +0200
From:      "O. Hartmann" <ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de>
To:        FreeBSD CURRENT <freebsd-current@freebsd.org>
Subject:   [CURRENT]: weird memory/linker problem?
Message-ID:  <20140622165639.17a1ba1e.ohartman@zedat.fu-berlin.de>

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Hello.

I face a strange problem on a set of CURRENT driven boxes. The systems in q=
uestion are
all the same version of CURRENT (more or less, a week or so discrepancy).

The boxes affected have 8 GB of RAM and are old-style Core2Duo systems.

The phenomenon:

Starting up the box shows the operating system working. But sometimes it is=
 impossible to
start certain applications, like Firefox - they segfault. More disturbing i=
s the fail of
the linker when building world. Sometimes I get strange messages like

relocation truncated to fit: R_X86_64_PC32 against symbol `__error' defined=
 in .text

when compiling/linking. The funny thing is: rebooting the box and doing exa=
ctly the same
very often leaves the system then operable - starting applications works, c=
ompiling works!

First I thought this could be a indication of a dying system and so I check=
ed the memory
for two days non-stop without any indication of anything wrong. The boxes d=
o not have ECC
RAM - it's Intel.

I see this problem on two C2D based boxes relatively often (one E8400 two c=
ore, another
Q6600 quadcore, both systems have 8 GB RAM). This phenomenon also occured t=
wo or three
months ago on another machine with 32 GB RAM and a Core-i7 3930K, but it we=
nt away (it was
the very same error as shown above).

Another system, a i3-3220 with 16 GB RAM never showed the problem although =
that system
build world also on a regular basis very frequent as the C2D systems do.

Well, I feel a bit confused. On the first view, the problem looks weird and=
 it indicates
a kind of memory problem - but testing the memory didn't show anything wron=
g.=20

Today "windowmaker" stopped starting due to a malformed command in one of w=
indowmaker's
library. I did reboot the box and everything was all right. Then, also toda=
y, I tried
compiling world and I got a weird error message about a misspelled "Int__xx=
x", I can not
remember exactly the text, I rebooted and everything was all right again.

Those errors are frequent on 8GB, C2D based systems and at the moment not p=
resent any
more on more modern systems with more memory as described above. This could=
 be a
coincidence, but it is strange anyway.

I do not exclude dying hardware, but I'd like to ask whether there is somet=
hing strange
going on with FreeBSD's memory management at the moment and whether those p=
roblems could
also be triggered by some nasty bug? I never see a crash (which would also =
indicated
faulty hardware), I mostly realise those strange behaviour either after a f=
resh boot or
after I ran some memory disk i/o intensive jobs, like updating the ports tr=
ee.

By the way, FreeBSD CURRENT suffer from a tremendous performance cut these =
days when
compiling world and updating the ports tree and running portmaster. On one =
box, on which
ports reside on a UFS partion, it takes more than 8 minutes to pass the por=
tmaster -da,
which is quick when not compiling world. On another system on which /usr/po=
rts is
residing on ZFS (the box has 16GB RAM!), it takes sometimes 30(!) minutes t=
o perform a
"svn update" while compiling world (that is the i3-3220 with 16 GB RAM syst=
em), it takes
6 - 15 minutes when the box is relaxed and updating the ports tree the firs=
t time (every
subsequent update is much faster).

Well, I know these reports of mine are a bit weird since I have no exact lo=
g of the
problems, but I think if there is an issue not with the hardware, I report =
those in.

Regards,

oh

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