kyle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Greetings.
In the process of switching distributions on one of my machines, I've
run into a problem where forcing a check of the RAID arrays causes the
system to lock up. I've got a bug open here
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=501126 , but I'm hoping
someone here can help me track it down.
To add a little more to the last post on that bug, I've since installed
gentoo, and am running gentoo's patched 2.6.28-gentoo-r5 kernel (along
with mdadm 2.6.8), and I see the bug here. I don't follow kernel
patches, and haven't looked too deeply into the distribution patches,
but diff isn't showing any changed code in drivers/{md,ata}/* .
And, to further describe "lock up", here's what happens in more detail:
I write "check" to every md array's 'sync_action' file in /sys.
Within about a second, the system stops responding to user input,
doesn't update the mouse pointer, doesn't respond to pings.
I've tried to get in a run of dmesg in before the crash, and I've been
able to see the usual messages about checking arrays, but that's it.
Also, I once tried waiting for each array check to finish before
starting the check to the next array, and that seemed to work for a
while, but some time late in the several hour process the system locked
up again. (It's possible that a cron job tried to start a check--no way
to know.)
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Kyle Liddell
Not what you are going to want to hear but badly designed hardware.
On a machine I had with 4 disks (2 on a build-in via, 2 on other
ports--either a built-in promise, or a sil pci card), when the 2
build-in via sata ports got used heavily at the same times as any
others--the machine became unstable, it caused issues with other
non-disk pci cards doing flakey things, it caused the machine to also
lockup (once the machine crashed, getting things to rebuild was almost
impossible-MTBF was <5 minutes after a reboot), my end solution was to
not use the via sata ports and then it became stable--not a great
solution. The via ports in my case were built into the mb and
connected at pci66 ports, and the real pci bus was the standard 33mhz.
It appeared to me as designed the via chipsets (And think your
chipset is pretty close to the one I was using) did not appear to deal
with with high levels of traffic to several devices at once, and would
become unstable.
Once I figured out the issue, I could duplicate it in under 5 minutes,
and the only working solution was to not use the via ports.
My mb at the time was a Asus k8v se deluxe with a K8T800 chipset, and
so long as it was not heavily used it was stable, but under heavy use
it was junk.
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