Re: FSCK and it crashes...

[Steven Dake <sdake@mvista.com>]

Gorden,

I believe there is a bug in RAID in 2.4.18 which causes resyncs never to 
complete (its fixed in 2.4.19).  You might check that your drive isn't 
resyncing (cat /proc/mdstat if you see a percentage, its resyncing). 
 This may or may not be your problem, although I'd try a newer kernel.

Thanks
-steve

Gordon Henderson wrote:

>I've been using Linux RAID for a few years now with good success, but have
>recently had a problem common to some systems I look after with kernel
>version 2.4.x.
>
>When I try to FSCK a RAID partition (and I've seen this happen on RAID 1
>and 5) the machine locks up needing a reset to get it going again. On past
>occasions I reverted to a 2.2 kernel with the patches and it went just
>fine, however this time I need to access hardware (New Promise IDE
>controllers) and LVM that only seem to be supported by very recent 2.4
>kernels. (ie 2.4.19 for the hardware)
>
>I've had a quick search of the archives and didn't really find anything -
>does anyone have any clues - maybe I'm missing something obvious?
>
>The box is running Debian3 and is a dual (AMD Athlon(tm) MP 1600+)
>processor box with 4 IDE drives on 2 promise dual 133 controllers (only
>the cd-rom on the on-board controllers) The kernels are stock ones off
>ftp.kernel.org. (Debian 3 comes with 2.4.18 which doesn't have the Promise
>drivers - I had to do the inital build by connecting one drive to the
>on-board controller, then migrate it over)
>
>The 4 drives are partitiond identically with 4 primary partitions, 256M,
>1024M, 2048M and the rest of the disk (~120M) the 4 big partitions being
>combined together into a raid 5 which I then turn into one big physical
>volume using LVM, then create a 150GB logical volume out of that (so I can
>take LVM snapshots using the remaining ~200GB avalable). I'm wondering if
>this is now a bit too ambitious. I'll do some test later without LVM, but
>I have had this problem on 2 other boxes that don't use LVM.
>
>The other partitions are also raid5 except for the root partition which is
>raid1 so it can boot.
>
>It's nice and fast, and seems stable when running, and can withstand the
>loss of any 1 disk, but when there's the nagging fear that you might never
>be able to fsck it, it's a bit worrying... (Although moving to XFS is
>something planned anyway, but I feel we're right on the edge here with new
>hardware and software and don't want to push ourselves over!)
>
>So any insight or clues would be appreciated,
>
>Thanks,
>
>Gordon
>
>
>Ps. Output of /proc/mdstat if it helps:
>
>md0 : active raid1 hdg1[1] hde1[0]
>      248896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
>
>md4 : active raid1 hdk1[1] hdi1[0]
>      248896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
>
>md1 : active raid5 hdk2[3] hdi2[2] hdg2[1] hde2[0]
>      1493760 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU]
>
>md2 : active raid5 hdk3[3] hdi3[2] hdg3[1] hde3[0]
>      6000000 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU]
>
>md3 : active raid5 hdk4[3] hdi4[2] hdg4[1] hde4[0]
>      353630592 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU]
>
>unused devices: <none>
>
>
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