Re: Single P4, many IDE PCI cards == trouble??

[Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org>]

On Fri Aug 29, 2003 at 03:38:17PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Gwe, 2003-08-29 at 15:00, Nick Urbanik wrote:
> > Is there _anyone_ who is using a number of ATA133 IDE disks (>=6), each on
> > its own IDE channel, on a number of PCI IDE cards, and doing so
> 
> The most I know of is 8, and that was one of the people who found the
> shared IRQ/IDE race cases that 2.4.21 or so fixed.

I have a ton of drives plugged into some promise IDE cards and my
motherboard's builtin ICH5 that I use for testing things.

I have not been seeing IRQ problems.  However, when I have both
the promise and the intel IDE drivers built into the kernel,
there _is_ some sortof a race condition present, such that
stat("/", &statbuf) returns the wrong value for statbuf.st_rdev
about 50% of the time when booting.  Instead of returning the
major/minor with the correct values (/dev/hda2 on the ICH5), it
instead returns some value from one of the drives on the promise
card such as /dev/hdh or some such.  I've tried tracking that
down, but havn't been able to squash it thus far.  Grrrr.

 -Erik

--
Erik B. Andersen             http://codepoet-consulting.com/
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