Re: 2.2.10-14 i686 SMP: IDE RAID-5 array hangs on mount

From: Khimenko Victor (khim@sch57.msk.ru)
Date: Mon Jan 17 2000 - 13:23:20 EST


In <3883285B.450536A@mit.edu> Adam C Powell IV (hazelsct@mit.edu) wrote:
> Greetings,

> I have a RAID-5 array across 10 GB partitions on four 17 GB IDE drives
> at hda-d, and a RAID-0 array across 5 GB partitions on the same drives,
> on a dual-Celeron ABIT BP6 motherboard (haven't installed the recent
> BIOS upgrade).

> I've built SMP kernels from 2.2.10 and 2.2.13 source with gcc-2.95, and
> then 2.2.13 and 2.2.14 with gcc-2.7.2.3, all using the standard Debian
> .config except 686 and SMP (well, approximately the Debian 2.2.13 config
> for 2.2.14).

That is: you are using broken RAID implementation and expect it to work
somehow ?

> For all of these kernels, the machine always hangs while mounting the
> RAID-5 array. It never hangs while mounting the RAID-0 array, which
> happens to come before it. And it never hangs under the non-SMP 386
> Debian kernel images.

> Are there any known races which got into 2.2.14? I haven't yet tried
> 2.2.15-pre, is there any reason to believe it might solve the problem?

It will not solve problem. RAID as it is in 2.2.x kernels us unstable and
unmaintained. You REALLY should use raid patches. There are some
incompatibilities with 2.2.x RAID implementation and latest RAID patches
and thus it's not going in 2.2.x but if you need working raid (and you do
hot have one) you SHOULD NOT use stock 2.2.x RAID. Use one from
http://people.redhat.com/mingo/raid-2.2.14-B1

> If not, the time involved in ckraiding is prohibitive- this is a
> production server for a very small group, so I can only test about one
> new kernel per week...

> (Yes, I know it might be slightly faster and more robust to put one
> drive on each controller, but I'm not quite brave enough to try to use
> the HPT366 controllers just yet, I care about data integrity more than
> speed, and these drives aren't anywhere near fast enough to use half the
> 33 MB/s bandwidth of the controllers, so no real speed loss, right?
> hdparm -t says 3.5 MB/s with the Debian 2.2.13 image.)

> Please cc replies to me, I'm not on this list. Thanks in advance for
> any help you can provide.

P.S. Hmm. Stefan Monnier said back in september "Every serious NFS user uses
the patched knfsd, and every serious raid user uses the new raid code". Looks
like he was wrong after all :-/

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