Re: Software RAID1 deadlock in 2.6.25 kernels

[Mike McCarthy <mike@w1nr.net>]

Bill Davidsen wrote:
> Mike McCarthy wrote:
>> Bill Davidsen wrote:
>>>
>>> Given heavy 2.6.25 use, my guess is still that the root cause of 
>>> this is hardware, and that the change in disk code either triggers 
>>> the hardware problem, or handles it differently. Are you by any 
>>> chance running NCQ on your system?
>>>
>> No.  This system and the drives pre-date NCQ.  I think NCQ is only 
>> implemented in SATA and these are IDE drives.  Sometime over the 
>> weekend, I am going to reload SUSE 11 and try to do some more debugging.
>>
>> BTW: It's back to 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22) running happily with a VMware 
>> server thrashing away at the disks.
>
> This has recycled back to the top of my todo list, I have a server in 
> mothballs with IDE drives, I'll pull it out, upgrade to FC9 current 
> (non-rawhide) and see if I have any problems. It's off due to lack of 
> need, not really obsolete, so it's a fair test. O'll put a dew hundred 
> GB of raid-1 and beat on it.
>
I was going to get back to you all today and let you know what I found.  
On Thursday, I rebuilt the system with SUSE 11 but before I did I went 
over all of the BIOS settings.  The second IDE drive was set to "NONE" 
instead of "AUTO".  Well, the installation went without the previous 
hitch of having to manually install grub on the first boot after the 
install.  It has also been running since then without issue.

Is it that simple?  Could that be all that was wrong?  What doesn't make 
sense is how 10.3 (kernel 2.6.22) never had an issue.  Perhaps without 
the BIOS reporting the second drive, the later kernel chose the wrong 
parameters setting it up and they didn't match what was set up by the 
BIOS for the first drive?

Mike