This Space for Rent

Fun freebsd bug of the day

I was trying to pull a track off an audio CD the other day and the Freebsd 4.9 box I was doing it on spat out a couple of scsi transport errors, then rebooted. I thought that was funny, so I tried it again, and once again the machine rebooted (I made it to the console that time, so I was able to see the kernel panic message before the machine rebooted). I then grubbed through our music pile for CDs which were known to be skippy on our CD player and fed them into the computer for what appeared to be hours of rebooting fun (punctuated by an occasional crash that was so bad that FreeBSD just hung up trying to sync the disk.)

On egypt (my Mastodon build box), no such hilarity happened; the cdparanoia process simply came to a grinding stop while the Linux 2.0.28 IDE subsystem started looping on the offending sector (and still is, 5 or so hours after I left home for work.)

The FreeBSD box has a SCSI cd-rom, while egypt has an IDE one. It's possible the buslogic device driver in the FreeBSD box is not the most reliable driver on the planet, and it's poking fingers into places where they shouldn't be.