Redeeman wrote:
On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 05:17 -0400, Kyle Liddell wrote:
On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 08:33:30PM -0500, Roger Heflin wrote:
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
...
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.
That does sound like my problem, and the hardware is similar. However, I don't think it's the VIA controller that's the problem here: I moved the two drives off the on-board VIA controller and placed them as slaves on the Promise card. I was able to install fedora, which was an improvement, but once installed, I was able to bring the system down again by forcing a check. I've got a spare Promise IDE controller, so I tried swapping it out, with no change.
I suppose it's a weird hardware bug, although it still is strange that certain combinations of kernels (which makes a little sense) + distributions (which makes no sense) will work. I just went back to debian on the machine, and it works fine.
I'm trying to reproduce the problem on another machine, but I'm not too hopeful.
I have a system with 6 drives in raid5, on such a k8v se deluxe board
with the via controller, and an additional PCI controller.
I am experiencing some weird problems on this system too, when doing
lots of read/write it will freeze for up to 10 seconds sometimes, what
happens is that one of the disks gets the bus soft reset.
Now with the old IDE driver, this would f*** up completely, and the box
had to be rebooted, however, libata was able to recover it nicely and
just continue after the freeze.
With the sata via's and sata_via under heavy enough loads it was not
recovering. Under lighter loads it did get some odd errors that were
not fatal.
I was never able to solve the issue, and since it wasnt a major problem
for the use, i have just ignored it.
On mine until I tried it full rebuild (after a crash) it was not an
issue, with 2 on the via, and 2 either on the promise or a sil pci
card it crashed quickly under a rebuild, the machine had been mostly
stable (a few odd things happened) for a couple of months, after
moving away from the via ports the few odd things quit happening, so I
believe the odd behavior (video capture cards appearing to lose parts
of their video data, video capture cards locking up internally-note 2
completely different pci card designs/chipsets were both doing funny
things).
do you suppose adding another pci card with IDE ports and discontinuing
use of the via controller entirely would fix it?
On mine moving everything off of the sata_via ports make things slower
but stable (the via pata/sata ports are on pci66x32bit vs. the pci bus
sharing a single pci33x32bit bus), so in the first setup
(2via/2pcibus) the slowest disk's share of bandwidth is in theory
66mb/second, on the second case (4pcibus) each disk's share of
bandwidth is in theory 33mb/second, and I could see a large difference
in the raid5 read/writes in one case vs the other, but the faster case
was unstable so useless.
though, i have actually just replaced this box with a newer, so it wont
do me much good now, however, the small amount of money a pci ide
controller costs, would be worth it just to actually find out what was
wrong.
I have since replaced mine (it is no longer a server needing more than
1 drive) so mine is not longer causing issues.
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