File system corruption with 9.2-R on PC Engines Alix boards

[John Nielsen]

On Mar 28, 2014, at 11:02 AM, Karl Pielorz <kpielorz_lst at tdx.co.uk> wrote:

> We have a number of PC Engines Alix boards, running FreeBSD 8.2. They boot off of an onboard CF cards.
> 
> I recently installed a new one of these with 9.2-Release (i386) - only to discover that it silently (i.e. with no errors) destroys the file system when in use.
> 
> Typically we install these systems then flip the file system over to 'read-only' when sending them out. The corruption happens while we're installing various packages etc.
> 
> We don't run journal soft-updates on these boxes - just regular soft-updates .
> 
> No console errors are logged, no syslog messages are logged. Just after a while you might go to edit '/etc/rc.conf' - to find when you vi it - it's now become a copy of '/etc/ntp.conf' - or other oddities.
> 
> A reboot runs fsck - which will usually fail then. Running a foreground check reals off thousands of duplicate errors. If you foreground check the file system, you're usually left with "not a lot" when it's finished (i.e. if you run 'fsck -y /').
> 
> 8.2 runs fine (we have systems that have been running embedded for years) - 9.2 doesn't.
> 
> I found a similar thread:
> 
> <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-March/066697.html>
> 
> This eludes to CF card quality etc. - the cards we've been using have worked fine for years - and a 9.2 'flaky' system reformatted to 8.2 then runs fine.
> 
> Anyone else running later than 8.2 on PC Engine Alix kit?

I have a pair of alix3dw systems that I use as wireless access points. Both are running 10-STABLE on internal CF without problems. (I do world and package builds on a faster host.) One has SU+J, the other has just SU. I know I ran some version of 9-STABLE on the same hardware as well (probably 9.1-ish) and don't remember any issues like those you are describing.

FWIW, both use this CF card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134575

You might try to see when the badness appeared in the FreeBSD 9 branch by building kernels from various points and running them. If you use a different build host and just build a custom kernel without (many) modules or world it shouldn't be too onerous. I'd be curious to see if a different CF card has the same problems too.

JN