Partclone Upload Stalling

jemerson93 · Feb 20, 2019, 4:08 PM

Trying the 4.15.2 kernel’s, I get the following…

jemerson93 · Feb 20, 2019, 7:22 PM

@george1421 said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 It would be interesting to know if you took the kernel the other direction and see if 4.15.2 has the same error. We’ve see quite a few cpu stalls recently. Maybe Sebastian’s patch took care of them. But downgrading the kernel also seems to mask the issue.

Hi George,

Just to give an update, I tried that kernel and it seems it goes into a Kernel Panic mode. I’ve also tried various other Kernel’s 4.19, 4.18, etc and I either go into the kernel panic or eventually the rcu_sched stall.

Stumped on what I could do to get this image captured.

george1421 · Feb 20, 2019, 8:18 PM

@jemerson93 That is very strange to see a kernel panic like that. I’ve only experienced that when I’ve mixed the inits arch with the kernel arch (i.e. booting bzImage (64 bit kernel) but having init_32.xz (32 bit inits) for the virtual disk).

I see you are running this on a hyper-v vm in bios mode. Are you getting the same results with a physical machine. Maybe its something in hyper-v land causing this cpu stall. Can you provide stats on your hypervisor version you are using (i.e. Windows 10 1803 with hyper-v loaded, etc).

jemerson93 · Feb 20, 2019, 8:45 PM

@george1421 said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 That is very strange to see a kernel panic like that. I’ve only experienced that when I’ve mixed the inits arch with the kernel arch (i.e. booting bzImage (64 bit kernel) but having init_32.xz (32 bit inits) for the virtual disk).

I see you are running this on a hyper-v vm in bios mode. Are you getting the same results with a physical machine. Maybe its something in hyper-v land causing this cpu stall. Can you provide stats on your hypervisor version you are using (i.e. Windows 10 1803 with hyper-v loaded, etc).

Hi George,

The host running FOG (and our images) is Windows Server 2016 Standard 1607 with Hyper-V loaded. All that we are running on this server is a few VM’s (FOG, Win10-UEFI, Win10-Legacy, and our DHCP server).

To give another example, in another location, we run Proxmox as our hypervisor. FOG and all of our images (we house many more images there) are created in Proxmox and we are currently having no issues deploying or capturing images. That FOG is version 1.5.5 and the kernel version is 4.19.1.

This VM specifically is running in BIOS mode (as I am trying to upload a legacy only image for older workstations). We seem to be able to deploy to physical workstations (and virtual machines perfectly fine). Capturing seems to have no issue except on this VM running in Gen 1 (BIOS Mode).

george1421 · Feb 20, 2019, 8:51 PM

@jemerson93 While it doesn’t help you at the moment, then can we say the issue of the cpu stall and other linux kernel strangeness is related to to hyper-v under windows 2016 server?

I have a hyper-v server running Windows 2016 Data Center in our backup hot site. This is for spinning up our Veeam images. The point is, I haven’t messed with hyper-v (ever sorry I’m a vmware guy) but I’m willing to see if I can create a VM and duplicate the same thing you see. The first step is to see if we have correlation between my server and your server. Then see if this is a common problem with linux OS running under hyper-v.

jemerson93 · Feb 21, 2019, 5:07 PM

@george1421 said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 While it doesn’t help you at the moment, then can we say the issue of the cpu stall and other linux kernel strangeness is related to to hyper-v under windows 2016 server?

I have a hyper-v server running Windows 2016 Data Center in our backup hot site. This is for spinning up our Veeam images. The point is, I haven’t messed with hyper-v (ever sorry I’m a vmware guy) but I’m willing to see if I can create a VM and duplicate the same thing you see. The first step is to see if we have correlation between my server and your server. Then see if this is a common problem with linux OS running under hyper-v.

Hi George,

Perfect, if you can let’s see if you get the same issue. I’m also going to spin up a VM at my home (I have Hyper-V and Proxmox on 2 servers at my house) and I’ll see if I can replicate the issue.

Sebastian Roth · Feb 22, 2019, 7:32 AM

@jemerson93 Can you please do me a favor testing-wise? I just updated the 4.19.1 kernels to have the Hyper-V patch included as well. Can you please downgrade to that kernel version on your FOG server and test again? The hard stall shouldn’t be happing with this version anymore.

About the other issue: I am looking forward to hear what you guys find out testing this. Maybe we can report that to the kernel developers when we find out what version exactly is causing this.

jemerson93 · Feb 22, 2019, 11:13 PM

@Sebastian-Roth said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 Can you please do me a favor testing-wise? I just updated the 4.19.1 kernels to have the Hyper-V patch included as well. Can you please downgrade to that kernel version on your FOG server and test again? The hard stall shouldn’t be happing with this version anymore.

About the other issue: I am looking forward to hear what you guys find out testing this. Maybe we can report that to the kernel developers when we find out what version exactly is causing this.

Hi Sebastian,

Unfortunately, I still got the stall. As a notice, I did get the legacy image to upload on 4.19.6 yesterday. Was extremely slow but did upload. Trying again right now on 4.19.6.

I am still setting it up at my home to test as well.

Sebastian Roth · Feb 22, 2019, 11:31 PM

@jemerson93 I meant the stall from the initial post.

jemerson93 · Feb 22, 2019, 11:41 PM

@Sebastian-Roth said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 I meant the stall from the initial post.

Hi Sebastian,

I did not see the stall from the initial post. Now I am just running into the self-detected stall.

jemerson93 · Feb 23, 2019, 12:09 AM

@Sebastian-Roth said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 I meant the stall from the initial post.

I also attempted 4.19.6 and got the same error. I’ll chalk it up as luck that I got it uploaded, but now I can’t re-upload.

Sebastian Roth · Feb 23, 2019, 4:26 AM

@jemerson93 It’s very interesting we see this or similar issues on many different platforms - hardware as well as virtualized environments. There does not seem to be a general answer and those kind of things have been around for years - when you search for rcu_sched you find tons of messages in kernel related mailing lists and forums.

But still this got more and more lately in the FOG forums as well and we are not sure why yet. But moving back to 4.15.2 kernel helped most of the people. We have seen issues with the newer init files not being compatible with this kernel and so I might ask you to manually download those more compatible inits (64 bit and 32bit). Rename/backup the ones you have in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe and put those in place (names init.xz and init_32.xz). Then downgrade to the 4.15.2 kernel and see if you still get the ugly error you had before when trying to downgrade the kernel.

If that doesn’t work then I expect this particular issue to be a problem with Hyper-V and Linux kernel option PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION - Meltdown patch (ref). But would be kind of strange as we have this option enabled in all later kernel version. Nevertheless you can try going back to even older versions of kernel and init. Find those used in FOG 1.5.0 here (kernel 4.13.4).

Beside that I have tried to find current information specific to Hyper-V. Not much I could find, really. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3743631 (anyone who’s access to RedHat stuff? @Wayne-Workman?)

Wayne Workman · Feb 23, 2019, 8:23 AM

@Sebastian-Roth I don’t have access to their articles anymore - but when I did have access back at a previous job, I found if I google’d enough I could find the same stuff elsewhere.

Has a duplicate IP been looked for yet, for the fog server and for the VMs?

jemerson93 · Feb 27, 2019, 10:03 PM

@Sebastian-Roth said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 It’s very interesting we see this or similar issues on many different platforms - hardware as well as virtualized environments. There does not seem to be a general answer and those kind of things have been around for years - when you search for rcu_sched you find tons of messages in kernel related mailing lists and forums.

But still this got more and more lately in the FOG forums as well and we are not sure why yet. But moving back to 4.15.2 kernel helped most of the people. We have seen issues with the newer init files not being compatible with this kernel and so I might ask you to manually download those more compatible inits (64 bit and 32bit). Rename/backup the ones you have in /var/www/html/fog/service/ipxe and put those in place (names init.xz and init_32.xz). Then downgrade to the 4.15.2 kernel and see if you still get the ugly error you had before when trying to downgrade the kernel.

If that doesn’t work then I expect this particular issue to be a problem with Hyper-V and Linux kernel option PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION - Meltdown patch (ref). But would be kind of strange as we have this option enabled in all later kernel version. Nevertheless you can try going back to even older versions of kernel and init. Find those used in FOG 1.5.0 here (kernel 4.13.4).

Beside that I have tried to find current information specific to Hyper-V. Not much I could find, really. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3743631 (anyone who’s access to RedHat stuff? @Wayne-Workman?)

Hi Sebastian,

My apologies for the late response. I backed up the old inits and downloaded and moved the ones you requested. I then downgraded to 4.15.2 kernel. Did not receive the kernel panic and the legacy image successfully uploaded. It take much longer then usual (I think it took about 3 and a half hours opposed to the past 30 minutes) but no CPU stall or initial network stall.

jemerson93 · Feb 27, 2019, 10:05 PM

@Wayne-Workman said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@Sebastian-Roth I don’t have access to their articles anymore - but when I did have access back at a previous job, I found if I google’d enough I could find the same stuff elsewhere.

Has a duplicate IP been looked for yet, for the fog server and for the VMs?

Hi Wayne,

I did verify there are no duplicate IP’s in use between the FOG server and VM’s nor are any in use on individual workstations on the LAN.

Sebastian Roth · Feb 28, 2019, 1:12 PM

@jemerson93 said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

It take much longer then usual (I think it took about 3 and a half hours opposed to the past 30 minutes) but no CPU stall or initial network stall.

I find it very strange that it it’s going slow with 4.15.2 as well. I will re-compile those kernels as well and see if it was missing the patch.

Sebastian Roth · Mar 1, 2019, 6:25 PM

@jemerson93 Please test the newly compiled 4.15.2 kernels you find here: https://fogproject.org/kernels/new/

Let us know if those help in speeding up the process and still don’t have the other rcu_sched stall issue.

jemerson93 · Mar 1, 2019, 6:25 PM

@Sebastian-Roth said in Partclone Upload Stalling:

@jemerson93 Please test the newly compiled 4.15.2 kernels you find here: https://fogproject.org/kernels/new/

Let us know if those help in speeding up the process and still don’t have the other rcu_sched stall issue.

Hi Sebastian,

It may take me a couple of days to get a response back to you. As soon as I can, I’ll do another upload and update you.

Partclone Upload Stalling

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