MinimServer stopped on Synology NAS

[simoncn]

It could be significant that the only two users who have reported this issue are using a Synology NAS with a Marvell Armada 370 processor.

The Synology firmware behaves in a strange way when the network connection is removed and restored. As well as producing a remove event followed by a restore event, it then produces a number of "phantom" remove/restore sequences. These phantom sequences don't occur on other versions of Linux.

These phantom sequences also occur on my Synology devices and are handled correctly by ohNet. My Synology devices don't have an Armada 370 processor. The log you sent me shows that on your NAS, some events are not happening in the order that they should and I haven't been able to come up with an explanation for how this could happen.

I have previously experienced an unrelated problem that turned out to be caused by a hardware fault in the Armada 370 processor (see this post). This experience has led me to treat this processor with some suspicion when things happen that appear to have no logical explanation. In the case of the other issue, I could reproduce it myself and debug it because I had the necessary hardware to do this and I was then able to implement and test a workaround.

Another possibility is that this isn't caused by the Armada 370 chip but is a timing issue that only occurs with a slow uniprocessor. If anyone reports the problem on another processor, this would eliminate the Armada 370 from suspicion.

Thanks again for all your help with investigating this issue.