Re: Promise SATAII150 TX4: strange disk ordering

[Brad Campbell <brad@wasp.net.au>]

Thorild Selen wrote:
> Brad Campbell writes:
>  > In one machine, I'm using 15 disks on 4 SATA150TX4 cards with
>  > 2.6.11.7 and have been now for over 4 months.. it's working
>  > perfectly.. not so much as a glitch.
> 
> Is this a single-processor system without hyperthreading or the like?
> In that case, it could be that the problem only appears on SMP/HT
> systems, which would be interesting to know.
> 
> (I was hit by the bug on a single-processor Xeon system, but with HT
> enabled. I never thought of testing if disabling HT would make the bug
> disappear or not. And now that the system is up and running again, I
> don't really have the possibility to experiment with it.)
> 
> If you have partitions on different devices that you can spare and
> feel a little risky, you can try running badblocks -w (WARNING: this
> will destroy any data on the disk/partition!) on several disks
> simultaneously.  That appears to be the simplest way to quickly
> reproduce the bug.

These 15 drives are in a RAID-6 that gets thrashed from time to time quite hard.. so there is almost 
*always* simultaneous IO to them.. But it is certainly a UP machine (both of them are).
This one has 15 drives RAID-6, the other has 10 drives RAID-5 and 3 drives RAID-5 (two on the 
Promise ctrlr and one on the on-board VIA)

No free partitions to spare, sorry.. all md's are pretty full.
However I did all sorts of badblocks/dd/bonnie runs when I was burning in the box and never had an 
issue at all.

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