OpenBSD 6.1 slow root login, slow service restart and system reboot

[tsarya]

Hello,

I have 2 VM's running OpenBSD 6.1 (64-bit) on my Proxmox VE 5.0 machine (HP ProLiant Microserver, Celeron G1610T, 16 GB RAM, 2x WD Gold 1 TB drives in ZFS mirror).

What I noticed is that after several hours of running, when I do a SSH login as a normal user to any of the OpenBSD VM's, then switch to root (su -), it takes at least a minute after entering the root password to get to the shell.
Also, when I restart a service for some reason or perform a system reboot, it takes several minutes. I don't observe high CPU/RAM usage...

I tried disabling mpbios in OpenBSD, but there's no improvement, same behavior.

Any ideas?

P.S. FreeBSD 11.1 (64-bit) is running ok.

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

this is a problem what triggers on some Hardware,
in combination with a kernel which is newer than 4.9 and OpenBSD 6.1.

Here are the Linux commits what make the problem
bb3dd056ed1af9b186f0d9fe849eab78c51d14ce..813ae37e6aed72cc457094b6066aa38efd66c9e9

I send it to the OpenBSD list.
I think it is a OpenBSD because no other OS is affected.

 

[tsarya]

Ok, good to know.

I hope that in OpenBSD 6.2 this will be fixed.

 

[tsarya]

...
this is a problem what triggers on some Hardware,
in combination with a kernel which is newer than 4.9 and OpenBSD 6.1.
...

I will change the CPU of the microserver with a Xeon E3-1220L which I received today from ebay.
Let's see if that will change anything as the Celeron G1610T does not have HT, VT-d, AES NI, AVX, etc.

Once I do the tests, I will share the info.

 

[tsarya]

Here is the outcome of a full day of testing:
with the Xeon E3-1220L the situation is a bit better, root login takes less time than before, service restart also.

Looking forward to seeing a fix in the future, no matter where it comes from, OpenBSD or KVM

Update: after a day or less, the system becomes slow again...

 

[tsarya]

Update: same behavior with OpenBSD 6.2.

 

[Louis Jasbetz]

I spotted identical behavior with ProxMox 5.2 and OpenBSD 6.4.
Date&Time is ok.
Problem is sleep command.
On fresh restart usleep(1s) is 1second delay.
When running obsd for a day usleep(1s) becomes about 20seconds delay (two days and 1s becomes 40 seconds etc.).
"top" command refreshes screen in about every 5 seconds. After a day it refreshes every 100 seconds and so on...

Test on Intel i5-2xxx and Intel i7-5xxx (delay increases: FAIL).
Test on AMD AMD E-450 APU (usleep(1s) is 1s; works OK).

Tested on single core, multiple cores, with -rtc parameter (different combinations) and nothing seems to work.

Is it because Intel processor lowers frequency on processor idle and increases frequency on load and somehow breaks tickcounter?

On fresh restart:
# time sleep 1
0m01.01s real

After a few hours:
# time sleep 1
0m10.84s real (about 50seconds)

Any suggestions?

 

[Louis Jasbetz]

I fixed my problem with delay

Solution:
; proxmox shell
# echo options kvm-intel preemption_timer=N >>/etc/modprobe.d/kvm-intel.conf
# reboot
# cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/preemption_timer
# N

 

[tsarya]

I fixed my problem with delay

Solution:
; proxmox shell
# echo options kvm-intel preemption_timer=N >>/etc/modprobe.d/kvm-intel.conf
# reboot
# cat /sys/module/kvm_intel/parameters/preemption_timer
# N

Any impact performance-wise or stability-wise by doing this?

 

[tsarya]

BTW, I installed yesterday OpenBSD 6.4 on Proxmox 5.4, preemption_timer is set to Y, and I observe normal operation of OpenBSD.

This was yesterday:

# time sleep 1
    0m01.01s real     0m00.00s user     0m00.00s system
# date
Fri Apr 12 23:23:27 EEST 2019

This is today:

# time sleep 1
    0m01.00s real     0m00.00s user     0m00.00s system
# date
Sat Apr 13 22:57:00 EEST 2019

Good! It seems KVM has been fixed.