Re: Promise SATA oops

[Aaron Lehmann <aaronl@vitelus.com>]

This crash kept happening for months, across all versions of the
kernel I tried (up through early 2.6.16 git snapshots). I ended up
buying a different SATA card, and this seems to have fixed the
problem. At around the same frequency as I experienced the nasty
hanging, I'm seeing this error message:

ata1: command 0xea timeout, stat 0x51 host_stat 0x0
ata1: translated ATA stat/err 0x51/04 to SCSI SK/ASC/ASCQ 0xb/00/00
ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata1: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }

...but the system continues running fine. This leads me to believe
that there's a bug in the Promise SATA driver that prevents it from
gracefully handling this error condition, whatever it is. The hard
drives are model WDC WD3200JD-60K, and I couldn't find any bad blocks
on them.


On Tue, Dec 20, 2005 at 12:17:19PM -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> 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?