[parisc-linux] L2000 stable with SMP and RAID

[parisc-linux] L2000 stable with SMP and RAID

[James Braid]

Hi list,

FYI, I downloaded the latest CVS kernel and compiled it on my L2000 and
it magically seems have fixed most of the stability problem's I have
been having with the box. Before the box would crap out randomly when
doing pretty much *any* I/O stuff. SMP was also very flaky.

SMP seems to be working fine, and top even seems to report the correct
values for load average and CPU utilization :-) It's been running
distributed.net for several days now with no worries.

I have got 2 disks in a RAID 0 config and have been testing them with
dbench and bonnie and so far the box seems to be pretty stable.

Cheers, James

Re: [parisc-linux] L2000 stable with SMP and RAID

[Joel Soete]

Hi James,

For my part I would like to test RAID-1 on my B180 (2 of 9Gb).
Could you let me know more on the RAID configuration you implemented?
Do you have a special slice (partition) for your F0 (parisc bootloader) 
and may be also for /boot?
Do you apply 'persistent-superblock 1' to allow auto detection at boot time?

Thanks in advance for your help,
	Joel

PS: may be a simple copy of your /etc/raidtab would be the simple answer 
to all my question :) ?

James Braid wrote:
> Hi list,
> 
> FYI, I downloaded the latest CVS kernel and compiled it on my L2000 and
> it magically seems have fixed most of the stability problem's I have
> been having with the box. Before the box would crap out randomly when
> doing pretty much *any* I/O stuff. SMP was also very flaky.
> 
> SMP seems to be working fine, and top even seems to report the correct
> values for load average and CPU utilization :-) It's been running
> distributed.net for several days now with no worries.
> 
> I have got 2 disks in a RAID 0 config and have been testing them with
> dbench and bonnie and so far the box seems to be pretty stable.
> 
> Cheers, James
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> parisc-linux mailing list
> parisc-linux@lists.parisc-linux.org
> http://lists.parisc-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/parisc-linux
> 

RE: [parisc-linux] L2000 stable with SMP and RAID

[James Braid]

> For my part I would like to test RAID-1 on my B180 (2 of 9Gb).
> Could you let me know more on the RAID configuration you implemented?
> Do you have a special slice (partition) for your F0 (parisc 
> bootloader) 
> and may be also for /boot?

My RAID config is just a 2-disk RAID-0 array for testing at the moment.
Heres the raidtab (probably not a lot of use to you though):

----

raiddev                 /dev/md0
raid-level              0
nr-raid-disks           2
chunk-size              4

device                  /dev/sdb1
raid-disk               0
device                  /dev/sdc1
raid-disk               1

----

Theres a RAID-1 root howto for Debian which I have used in the past
here: http://www.james.rcpt.to/programs/debian/raid1/ 


Cheers, James

RE: [parisc-linux] L2000 stable with SMP and RAID

[joel.soete]

Quoting James Braid <james.braid@peace.com>:

> > For my part I would like to test RAID-1 on my B180 (2 of 9Gb).
> > Could you let me know more on the RAID configuration you implemented?
> > Do you have a special slice (partition) for your F0 (parisc 
> > bootloader) 
> > and may be also for /boot?
> 
> My RAID config is just a 2-disk RAID-0 array for testing at the moment.
> Heres the raidtab (probably not a lot of use to you though):
> 
> ----
> 
> raiddev                 /dev/md0
> raid-level              0
> nr-raid-disks           2
> chunk-size              4
> 
> device                  /dev/sdb1
> raid-disk               0
> device                  /dev/sdc1
> raid-disk               1
> 
> ----
> 
> Theres a RAID-1 root howto for Debian which I have used in the past
> here: http://www.james.rcpt.to/programs/debian/raid1/ 
> 
Very interesting.

Many thanks,
    Joel


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RE: [parisc-linux] L2000 stable with SMP and RAID

[joel.soete]

Hi James,

Quoting James Braid <james.braid@peace.com>:

> > For my part I would like to test RAID-1 on my B180 (2 of 9Gb).
> > Could you let me know more on the RAID configuration you implemented?
> > Do you have a special slice (partition) for your F0 (parisc 
> > bootloader) 
> > and may be also for /boot?
> 
> My RAID config is just a 2-disk RAID-0 array for testing at the moment.
> Heres the raidtab (probably not a lot of use to you though):
> 
> ----
> 
> raiddev                 /dev/md0
> raid-level              0
> nr-raid-disks           2
> chunk-size              4
> 
> device                  /dev/sdb1
> raid-disk               0
> device                  /dev/sdc1
> raid-disk               1
> 
> ----
> 
> Theres a RAID-1 root howto for Debian which I have used in the past
> here: http://www.james.rcpt.to/programs/debian/raid1/ 
> 
Thanks to this, I build on my second disk 
sdb1    (a F0 slice of about 16Mb)
sdb2    swap (128Mb == Physical memory size)
sdb3    /boot (about 64Mb to be able to test severall kernels)
sdb5 => md0   /      (about 1.5 Gb)

modify fstab to replace my boot device by /dev/md0;
modify palo.conf to make this disk bootable and find its kernel into /boot
partition and that works.

I just now have to complete the raidtab configuration and recover the rest of my
own slices than finaly fully rebuild md in non degraded mode and a small script
to duplicate F0 and boot slices (not yet supported as md AFAIK).

Many thanks again for your help,
    Joel


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