Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 12:17:19 -0800
From: Aaron Lehmann <aaronl@vitelus.com>
To: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>
Cc: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Promise SATA oops
Message-ID: <20051220201719.GC15466@vitelus.com>
References: <20051202045853.GD3677@vitelus.com> <438FDB9D.2030201@pobox.com> <20051202195109.GE3677@vitelus.com>
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On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 11:51:09AM -0800, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> Still isn't stable. It froze within hours after announcing in all
> terminals that it was disabling a certain IRQ. Now the RAID is so
> degraded that root can't even be mounted. Was the Promise controller a
> bad choice for a reliable setup?
> 
> I may not have time to look at this further until late next week, but
> I'll follow up with whatever I learn.

Argh, died again!! It had been stable for over 12 days. Same error
message, and the root md is degraded and dirty just like last time.
This is a very severe state with high risk of data loss. When things
went sour, terminals and most applications still kept working, but
anything that touched the filesystem froze up. I had a shell open in a
chroot on a ramdisk, but dmesg just hung for a few minutes and then
exited with a "Bus error". I had no other way of examining the kernel
log since the machine runs X.

This was running 2.6.15-rc4. Crashes seem to happen less frequently
with it than with 2.6.14.x, but when they happen they leave the RAID
in a severe state. I also don't think 2.6.14.2 said anything about
disabling the IRQ.

I'm very desperate now. About every week I experience a crash that
damages my RAID array to the point where it can't boot, as if the
instability wasn't bad enough. Do I need to buy a hardware RAID card?
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