Re: Software RAID1 deadlock in 2.6.25 kernels

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Mike McCarthy wrote:
> 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?

Oh well, I needed to upgrade that system, I'll push testing down the 
week a day or two. It could well have been that simple.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  "Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
  be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark