Re: sata_sil 0.9 experience

[Kanniball <kanniball@zmail.pt>]

Bob Ramstad:
this is a well known issue. Check the source code for sata_sil.c where you 
will find a lot of seagate drives blacklisted.
check this pages:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide&m=111079212116799&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide&m=111260146423451&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-ide&m=111173492412748&w=2

although with my experience on same hardware, it that only the write speed is 
higher... (after applying both patches).

Regards,

Paulo Fidalgo, aka Kanniball


On Wednesday 01 June 2005 19:51, Bob Ramstad wrote:
> This is anecdotal, but may be helpful.  If you require more details,
> please let me know.
>
> I recently converted a WBEL3 (RHEL3 clone) system from using IDE
> drives to using Serial ATA.  I found the performance using the built
> in driver abysmal, and switched over to libata + sata_sil.  The
> sata_sil version shipping with the RHEL3 kernel is 0.54 (ancient) but
> gave me much better performance (45x as fast).
>
> Things seemed fine, but I noticed when doing massive copies -- say 20
> GB of data in 2000 files -- that it was not uncommon to have one or
> two files corrupted in the copy.  Recopying the affected files would
> fix the problem.  I started keeping md5 checksums of anything I was
> copying back and forth.
>
> The problem finally drove me nuts, and I did some research online and
> found the 0.8 -> 0.9 sata_sil driver.  Up until then I didn't know I
> was using an ancient version of sata_sil.
>
> Unfortunately, I was unable to just upgrade to 2.4.31 due to
> threads... when I compiled 2.4.31-rc1 and booted with it, BIND aka
> named would dump core, and upon investigation I discovered that the
> vanilla 2.4 kernel would not work right with RHEL3.  (I'm sure if I
> spent a bunch of time that there has to be a way to compile 2.4 so
> that it works with RHEL3, but I'm not really all that interested in
> that particular learning curve.)
>
> I then tried to use the sata_sil.c 0.9 with the kernel-source for
> RHEL3 and that failed miserably with many compile time errors... I
> also tried to replace the entire drivers/scsi directory, and that
> failed too.
>
> Finally, I patched by hand my 0.54 sata_sil.c source by looking at the
> 0.8 -> 0.9 changes and making the same changes.
>
> The upshot of all of this is that my modified 0.54 with manual 0.8 ->
> 0.9 sata_sil.c seems to work much better.  I've done some testing,
> with three or four large copies, and had no data corruption.  My
> testing is not extensive, however.
>
> My hardware is ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe (nForce2 chipset) with onboard
> Silicon Image SATA RAID.  Drives are two new Seagates ST3250823AS.  I
> use them with Linux LVM with some partitions as ext3 on top of RAID1
> and some straight ext3 partitions.  I do not use the SI RAID
> functionality, the drives are used as plain old /dev/sdX with software
> /dev/mdX RAID.
>
> I hope this information helps.  Of course, I'm feeling a little bit
> painted into a corner, I can't keep doing weird hand patches to the
> kernel-source for RHEL3 when new versions of the kernel come out...
> and given that RedHat seems to have no urgency to upgrade sata_sil
> given the shipping version is 0.54 (archaic) I'm hopeful that the 0.9
> will finally make it into the next official RHEL3 kernel given the
> data corruption issues.  The other alternative from my perspective is
> to consider going to RHEL4 as at least the learning curve there is
> probably something I'll have to deal with eventually anyway.
>
> Thank you for all your hard work on sata_sil -- it is much appreciated
> by a LOT of people!
>
> Do let me know if there is anything specific I can test or details I
> can provide... or if any of you have specific thoughts on how I can
> best maintain my system, given the weird hand patched mess that it is
> right now!
>
> -- Bob