Subject: Re: Single P4, many IDE PCI cards == trouble??
From: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
To: Nick Urbanik <nicku@vtc.edu.hk>
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
In-Reply-To: <3F4EA30C.CEA49F2F@vtc.edu.hk>
References: <3F4EA30C.CEA49F2F@vtc.edu.hk>
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Date: 29 Aug 2003 10:50:44 +0100
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On Gwe, 2003-08-29 at 01:49, Nick Urbanik wrote:
> Dear Folks,
> 
> With a single 2.26GHz P4, an Asus P4B533-E motherboard, is it possible
> to reliably use two additional PCI IDE cards (using SI680), one hard
> disk per channel, and have the thing work reliably?

You should be able to, although with software raid your PCI bandwidth
limits will limit the ultimate performance for mirroring/raid

> My machine locks solid at unpredictable intervals with no response
> from keyboard lights, no Alt-Sysrq-x response, etc, with a wide
> variety of 2.4.x kernels, including 2.4.22.

A freeze in an IRQ handler would cause that kind of thing, turning on 
the NMI watchdog might get you a trace in such a failure case - and 
that would help.

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