kern/156691: [vmware] [panic] panic when using hard disks as RAW devices within VMWare ESXi 4.1-u1

[Helmut Schneider]

Appendix:

I tried with BusLogic Parallel (FreeBSD-32bit), LSI Logic Parallel and LSI 
Logic SAS (both FreeBSD-64bit). The problem remains (I hope that was what 
you ment with "try using a different storage controller").

But what is interesting (and makes me think that the controller is not to 
blame):

I re-partition the disk using gpart:

mfsbsd# gpart show da1
=>       34  156301421  da1  GPT  (75G)
         34        128    1  freebsd-boot  (64K)
        162    4194304    2  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
    4194466    4194304    3  freebsd-swap  (2.0G)
    8388770   20971520    4  freebsd-ufs  (10G)
   29360290    4194304    5  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
   33554594    4194304    6  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
   37748898    2097152    7  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
   39846050    4194304    8  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
   44040354    4194304    9  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
   48234658    8388608   10  freebsd-ufs  (4.0G)
   56623266   16777216   11  freebsd-ufs  (8.0G)
   73400482    8388608   12  freebsd-ufs  (4.0G)
   81789090   62914560   13  freebsd-ufs  (30G)
  144703650    4194304   14  freebsd-ufs  (2.0G)
  148897954    7403501   15  freebsd-ufs  (3.5G)

mfsbsd#

I now copy ~30GB of data (actually a clone of a running system using vdisks) 
to those partitons except for the designated / partition (da1p2). The system 
does *not* panic. (I used rsync to push the data from the live system if it 
is worth to mention it)

mfsbsd# df -h | grep da1
/dev/da1p2     1.9G     12K    1.8G     0%    /mnt/da1
/dev/da1p4     9.7G    5.5G    3.4G    62%    /mnt/da1/usr
/dev/da1p5     1.9G    290M    1.5G    16%    /mnt/da1/var
/dev/da1p6     1.9G    804M    1.0G    44%    /mnt/da1/var/log
/dev/da1p7     989M    143M    767M    16%    /mnt/da1/var/amavis
/dev/da1p8     1.9G    998K    1.8G     0%    /mnt/da1/var/spool
/dev/da1p9     1.9G    5.8M    1.8G     0%    /mnt/da1/var/named
/dev/da1p10    3.9G    989M    2.6G    27%    /mnt/da1/var/squid
/dev/da1p11    7.7G    1.9G    5.3G    26%    /mnt/da1/var/www
/dev/da1p12    3.9G    1.3G    2.3G    35%    /mnt/da1/var/db/mysql
/dev/da1p13     29G     18G    8.7G    67%    /mnt/da1/var/vsftpd
/dev/da1p14    1.9G    118K    1.8G     0%    /mnt/da1/tmp
/dev/da1p15    3.4G     31M    3.1G     1%    /mnt/da1/home
mfsbsd#

But as soon as I rsync/dump/cp the / partition the panic occurs. Reliable.