2 hours to reboot?

[frankenman]

I'm not sure if this is the correct thread to post in, but it's the closest I could find.

My question is this: why does my FreeNAS take 2-6 hours to reboot?

It hangs at 'Mounting Local Filesystems'. It happens whenever I set up my 6x2TB-drive RAID-Z2 (with or without 2 hot spares). If I remove the drives, it reboots in a normal amount of time (2-3 minutes). As for hardware, it is listed at the bottom of the post. I'm running this in a VM on ESXi 5 with a RocketRAID 2720 passed through. What are some troubleshooting steps I can take? I can't really pass the VM drives without passing the controller; the controller is not supported by ESXi.

AMD FX-8150
Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD3
2x8GB and 2x4GB RAM (12GB for the FreeNAS VM)
2x Intel PCIe NICs
Radeon 3450
RocketRAID 2720
Norco 4216 case (SFF-8087 Backplanes)
Kingwin Lazer Platiunum 550W PSU

Thanks for the help!

 

[cyberjock]

Hey jgreco! Here we go with another thread about ESXi. (He and I have a discussion going on elsewhere about FreeNAS and ESXi. I'm teasing him, it's not that you did anything OP.)

 

[jgreco]

Find out where it is hanging. What is it hanging around doing when you hit control-T?

 

[frankenman]

Here are some screengrabs. The first is where it hung, the second and third are me hitting control-t (once, and then as many times as I felt necessary :)

Code:

cmd: zpool 579 [zio->io_cv)]152.10r 0.00u 0.05s 0% 2520k 

I also forgot to mention that there is nothing on the volume right now, I've erased it and started over numerous times.

 

[jgreco]

That makes it appear as though the system is hanging on I/O to your controller. PCI passthrough is kind of dependent on all the bits being designed correctly and working together. Your system may be experiencing a problem with how interrupts are being handled, or something equally obscure, that makes it almost-work.

How does it work once it has actually booted? As expected? Very slow?

You might want to get into the BIOS and see what tweakables there might be regarding that slot and related settings. Is your BIOS up to date? Is the firmware on the RocketRAID up to date?

This isn't the same board but may lead you to other things to research.

You could also try installing something like Windows in a VM with the controller passed through to see if that works; if it doesn't, basically don't expect FreeNAS to either. This is something you should absolutely try.

You could also try a controller that's known to be passed through without issues. Lots of people do this with LSI's like the IBM M1015 (cross-flashed or not). This will only fix it if the controller is the problem, not if the mainboard's the issue.

Generally speaking, the "desktop" motherboard vendors don't put a lot of effort into making things like PCI passthru work, so while you may get it to work in a few months after a few BIOS updates and some chats with their tech support, the frustration-reduced method to take advantage of PCI passthru is to use a server board from a company that specializes in servers, because they're likely to have actually tested it in server environments, which generally includes tech support bright enough that when you talk to them, you don't have to explain what "ESXi" is.

Sorry if that's not exactly the most ideal answer. Hopefully one of these will lead you towards a resolution. Feel free to follow up with details.

 

[frankenman]

Those are some good thoughts, thanks. BIOS and RAID firmware are up to date.

I haven't really used FreeNAS much after it's been loaded. I initially installed FreeNAS, set up the volume, and then had to move the server, which required a shutdown. That's when I noticed the issue, that boot up. From the little I've used it, I think it performs fine copying a small folder with a few files. I would test it now, but it's still booting up

I do have a Windows VM using another RocketRAID 2720, and it works without issues without RAID; I pass through the controller and have 4 drives attached independently. You could be right about the interrupts, though, because when I attached a RAID set that I had been using previously, it took forever (2-3 days) to copy 2TB off of it. Right now, though, I can copy drive-to-drive at 70-120MB/s, normal speed as far as I'm concerned.

I could try a different controller. I have two IBM M5015s sitting around. My plan had been to use them; however, my SFF-8087 cables aren't long enough for my case. $80 worth of 75mm cables is tough to swallow right now, I just quit my job and went back to college. I have one breakout cable, though, so I can try four drives, at least.