Re: Software RAID1 deadlock in 2.6.25 kernels

Bill Davidsen wrote:

Mike McCarthy wrote:

quoted

Bill Davidsen wrote:

quoted

Given heavy 2.6.25 use, my guess is still that the root cause of 
this is hardware, and that the change in disk code either triggers 
the hardware problem, or handles it differently. Are you by any 
chance running NCQ on your system?

No.  This system and the drives pre-date NCQ.  I think NCQ is only 
implemented in SATA and these are IDE drives.  Sometime over the 
weekend, I am going to reload SUSE 11 and try to do some more debugging.

BTW: It's back to 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22) running happily with a VMware 
server thrashing away at the disks.

This has recycled back to the top of my todo list, I have a server in 
mothballs with IDE drives, I'll pull it out, upgrade to FC9 current 
(non-rawhide) and see if I have any problems. It's off due to lack of 
need, not really obsolete, so it's a fair test. O'll put a dew hundred 
GB of raid-1 and beat on it.

I was going to get back to you all today and let you know what I found.  
On Thursday, I rebuilt the system with SUSE 11 but before I did I went 
over all of the BIOS settings.  The second IDE drive was set to "NONE" 
instead of "AUTO".  Well, the installation went without the previous 
hitch of having to manually install grub on the first boot after the 
install.  It has also been running since then without issue.

Is it that simple?  Could that be all that was wrong?  What doesn't make 
sense is how 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22) never had an issue.  Perhaps without 
the BIOS reporting the second drive, the later kernel chose the wrong 
parameters setting it up and they didn't match what was set up by the 
BIOS for the first drive?

Mike