I've been using Linux RAID for a few years now with good success, but have
recently had a problem common to some systems I look after with kernel
version 2.4.x.
When I try to FSCK a RAID partition (and I've seen this happen on RAID 1
and 5) the machine locks up needing a reset to get it going again. On past
occasions I reverted to a 2.2 kernel with the patches and it went just
fine, however this time I need to access hardware (New Promise IDE
controllers) and LVM that only seem to be supported by very recent 2.4
kernels. (ie 2.4.19 for the hardware)
I've had a quick search of the archives and didn't really find anything -
does anyone have any clues - maybe I'm missing something obvious?
The box is running Debian3 and is a dual (AMD Athlon(tm) MP 1600+)
processor box with 4 IDE drives on 2 promise dual 133 controllers (only
the cd-rom on the on-board controllers) The kernels are stock ones off
ftp.kernel.org. (Debian 3 comes with 2.4.18 which doesn't have the Promise
drivers - I had to do the inital build by connecting one drive to the
on-board controller, then migrate it over)
The 4 drives are partitiond identically with 4 primary partitions, 256M,
1024M, 2048M and the rest of the disk (~120M) the 4 big partitions being
combined together into a raid 5 which I then turn into one big physical
volume using LVM, then create a 150GB logical volume out of that (so I can
take LVM snapshots using the remaining ~200GB avalable). I'm wondering if
this is now a bit too ambitious. I'll do some test later without LVM, but
I have had this problem on 2 other boxes that don't use LVM.
The other partitions are also raid5 except for the root partition which is
raid1 so it can boot.
It's nice and fast, and seems stable when running, and can withstand the
loss of any 1 disk, but when there's the nagging fear that you might never
be able to fsck it, it's a bit worrying... (Although moving to XFS is
something planned anyway, but I feel we're right on the edge here with new
hardware and software and don't want to push ourselves over!)
So any insight or clues would be appreciated,
Thanks,
Gordon
Ps. Output of /proc/mdstat if it helps:
md0 : active raid1 hdg1[1] hde1[0]
248896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md4 : active raid1 hdk1[1] hdi1[0]
248896 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md1 : active raid5 hdk2[3] hdi2[2] hdg2[1] hde2[0]
1493760 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU]
md2 : active raid5 hdk3[3] hdi3[2] hdg3[1] hde3[0]
6000000 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU]
md3 : active raid5 hdk4[3] hdi4[2] hdg4[1] hde4[0]
353630592 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 0 [4/4] [UUUU]
unused devices: <none>
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