From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Aaron Lehmann Subject: Re: Promise SATA oops Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:17:19 -0800 Message-ID: <20051220201719.GC15466@vitelus.com> References: <20051202045853.GD3677@vitelus.com> <438FDB9D.2030201@pobox.com> <20051202195109.GE3677@vitelus.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from dsl081-060-252.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([64.81.60.252]:42880 "EHLO vitelus.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932075AbVLTURV (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:17:21 -0500 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20051202195109.GE3677@vitelus.com> Sender: linux-ide-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org To: Jeff Garzik Cc: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 11:51:09AM -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote: > Still isn't stable. It froze within hours after announcing in all > terminals that it was disabling a certain IRQ. Now the RAID is so > degraded that root can't even be mounted. Was the Promise controller a > bad choice for a reliable setup? > > I may not have time to look at this further until late next week, but > I'll follow up with whatever I learn. Argh, died again!! It had been stable for over 12 days. Same error message, and the root md is degraded and dirty just like last time. This is a very severe state with high risk of data loss. When things went sour, terminals and most applications still kept working, but anything that touched the filesystem froze up. I had a shell open in a chroot on a ramdisk, but dmesg just hung for a few minutes and then exited with a "Bus error". I had no other way of examining the kernel log since the machine runs X. This was running 2.6.15-rc4. Crashes seem to happen less frequently with it than with 2.6.14.x, but when they happen they leave the RAID in a severe state. I also don't think 2.6.14.2 said anything about disabling the IRQ. I'm very desperate now. About every week I experience a crash that damages my RAID array to the point where it can't boot, as if the instability wasn't bad enough. Do I need to buy a hardware RAID card?