I'm confident that the development of IDE drivers for 2.4 is in excellent
hands, with Alan and Andre working together. Still, the IDE drivers on the
popular Promise cards have been unstable for a while now, and things have
clearly gone from quite good to worse.
Andre appears to be faced with very buggy and idiosyncratic hardware, and
the recent problems have been introduced in the attempt to accomodate for
this. Personally, for instance, I'm still running 2.4.16 with Andre's
patch on a Promise '69 and a 160GB drive, and I've never had a hint of a
problem -- heavy use over networks for months. Now people are reporting
serious problems with this card.
Non-functioning harddrives is obviously not as bad as losing data, but
still this is a bummer, man. How about a development policy to consolidate
progress and reduce the complexity of the task? Something like, Promise
cards that operate to spec get left alone. Idiosyncratic cards get an
experimental label and warnings, maybe only unofficial support through
patches, or they get marked as bad.
Add a diagnostic to the documentation. Let people bug the vendor about out
of spec hardware.
Linus commented earlier on how ATA development drives people up the wall;
we just had one person burn out. So let's do something about it.
Cheers,
Peter
Peter,
The water is warm, get wet!
As far as Promise, I am working on a contract w/ their development group
to solve all of these issues for good.
I find it interesting that 2.4.16 is rock solid.
Since I am still picking up the pieces and sorting out patch trees, if you
have a copy of that patch and would send it back my way. It will go a long
way to solving the mystery.
Cheers,
Andre Hedrick
LAD Storage Consulting Group
On Sat, 31 Aug 2002, Peter wrote:
>
> I'm confident that the development of IDE drivers for 2.4 is in excellent
> hands, with Alan and Andre working together. Still, the IDE drivers on the
> popular Promise cards have been unstable for a while now, and things have
> clearly gone from quite good to worse.
>
> Andre appears to be faced with very buggy and idiosyncratic hardware, and
> the recent problems have been introduced in the attempt to accomodate for
> this. Personally, for instance, I'm still running 2.4.16 with Andre's
> patch on a Promise '69 and a 160GB drive, and I've never had a hint of a
> problem -- heavy use over networks for months. Now people are reporting
> serious problems with this card.
>
> Non-functioning harddrives is obviously not as bad as losing data, but
> still this is a bummer, man. How about a development policy to consolidate
> progress and reduce the complexity of the task? Something like, Promise
> cards that operate to spec get left alone. Idiosyncratic cards get an
> experimental label and warnings, maybe only unofficial support through
> patches, or they get marked as bad.
>
> Add a diagnostic to the documentation. Let people bug the vendor about out
> of spec hardware.
>
> Linus commented earlier on how ATA development drives people up the wall;
> we just had one person burn out. So let's do something about it.
>
> Cheers,
> Peter
>
>
> -
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>
Hi Andre,
Here's the patch that's given me flawless performance on a PDC20269 and
the Maxtor 160GB since December -- I bought the drive when I noticed you
had a driver for it. This is E-IDE driver revision 6.31 from mid-December
2001, with 2.4.16 mainline. I and my students use the large drive largely
for digital video; it's mounted through NFS on another machine also
running 2.4.16. There's a CD drive and a DVD writer on the same machine as
the Promise card, and they work great. I use the DVD writer for vanilla
ISO images of compressed video; there may of course be modes it doesn't
handle. For a while I had a CDRW that also worked fine.
Good news that you're working with the Promise guys. My point is don't
spread yourself too thin. Consolidate the stuff that's working, and don't
destabilize perfectly good code bending over backwards for poor hardware.
Some girls are just too hard to please to be worth the trouble.
And hey, great work!
Cheers,
Peter
Kernel command line: auto BOOT_IMAGE=Linux ro root=1608
BOOT_FILE=/boot/kernel-2.4.
ide_setup: hdb=ide-scsi
ide_setup: hdd=ide-scsi
ide_setup: ide2=ata66
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
PIIX4: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
PIIX4: chipset revision 1
PIIX4: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:DMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:DMA
PDC20269: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 68
PCI: Found IRQ 7 for device 00:0d.0
PDC20269: chipset revision 2
PDC20269: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20269: ATA-66/100 forced bit set (WARNING)!!
ide2: BM-DMA at 0xbc00-0xbc07, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
ide3: BM-DMA at 0xbc08-0xbc0f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
hda: Maxtor 91360D8, ATA DISK drive
hdb: CD-ROM 48X/AKU, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdc: Maxtor 51536U3, ATA DISK drive
hdd: PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-104, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hde: Maxtor 4G160J8, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
ide2 at 0xac00-0xac07,0xb002 on irq 7
hda: 26563824 sectors (13601 MB) w/256KiB Cache, CHS=1653/255/63, UDMA(33)
hdc: 30015216 sectors (15368 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=29777/16/63, UDMA(33)
hde: 320173056 sectors (163929 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=317632/255/63, UDMA(133)
Partition check:
hda: hda1 hda2 < hda5 >
hdc: [PTBL] [1868/255/63] hdc2 < hdc5 hdc6 hdc7 hdc8 >
hde: hde1
SCSI subsystem driver Revision: 1.00
scsi0 : SCSI host adapter emulation for IDE ATAPI devices
Vendor: E-IDE Model: CD-ROM 48X/AKU Rev: U22
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Vendor: PIONEER Model: DVD-RW DVR-104 Rev: 1.20
Type: CD-ROM ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1 at scsi0, channel 0, id 1, lun 0
sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 0x/48x xa/form2 cdda tray
Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.12
sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 15x/15x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
Andre et al,
Just to add some more positivity: I'm running 2.4.18-ac and 2.4.19-pre
and stable kernels (currently 2.4.19-rc3 vanilla) for a while now on my
fileserver. It has 1 onboard VIA and 2 PCI Promise controllers and a
total of 6 disks attached (every disk on its own cable). I kept the BIOS
versions of the Promise controllers up to date all the time. All disks
are running automagically - without passing kernel options - on their
max possible UDMA transfer rate, and even the 160Gb LBA48 disk is
behaving fine. The disks are in constant heavy use as fileserver for
500+ clients. With respect to IDE, the system is rock solid for a long
time now, and I have never ever seen even a little bit of data
corruption.
Regards,
- Robbert Kouprie
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 6.31
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with
idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 39
VP_IDE: chipset revision 6
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with
idebus=xx
VP_IDE: VIA vt82c686b (rev 40) IDE UDMA100 controller on pci00:07.1
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xa000-0xa007, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xa008-0xa00f, BIOS settings: hdc:DMA, hdd:pio
PDC20269: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 50
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:0a.0
PDC20269: chipset revision 2
PDC20269: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20269: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary MASTER Mode Secondary MASTER
Mode.
ide2: BM-DMA at 0xcc00-0xcc07, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
ide3: BM-DMA at 0xcc08-0xcc0f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
PDC20267: IDE controller on PCI bus 00 dev 58
PCI: Found IRQ 10 for device 00:0b.0
PDC20267: chipset revision 2
PDC20267: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
PDC20267: (U)DMA Burst Bit ENABLED Primary PCI Mode Secondary PCI Mode.
ide4: BM-DMA at 0xe000-0xe007, BIOS settings: hdi:DMA, hdj:pio
ide5: BM-DMA at 0xe008-0xe00f, BIOS settings: hdk:DMA, hdl:pio
hda: ST34321A, ATA DISK drive
hdc: Maxtor 54098U8, ATA DISK drive
hde: Maxtor 4G160J8, ATA DISK drive
hdg: WDC WD1200BB-00CAA0, ATA DISK drive
hdi: Maxtor 94098U8, ATA DISK drive
hdk: Maxtor 98196H8, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
ide2 at 0xbc00-0xbc07,0xc002 on irq 11
ide3 at 0xc400-0xc407,0xc802 on irq 11
ide4 at 0xd000-0xd007,0xd402 on irq 10
ide5 at 0xd800-0xd807,0xdc02 on irq 10
hda: 8404830 sectors (4303 MB) w/128KiB Cache, CHS=523/255/63, UDMA(33)
hdc: 80041248 sectors (40981 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=79406/16/63,
UDMA(66)
hde: 320173056 sectors (163929 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=19929/255/63,
UDMA(133)
hdg: 234441648 sectors (120034 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=232581/16/63,
UDMA(100)
hdi: 80041248 sectors (40981 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=79406/16/63,
UDMA(66)
hdk: 160086528 sectors (81964 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=158816/16/63,
UDMA(100)