Re: FS Corruption in 2.1.109

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Wed, 22 Jul 1998 01:31:38 -0700 (PDT)


On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Christopher Seawood wrote:
>
> I grabbed the diagnostic utility from Western Digital's website. It
> claimed that neither drive had any errors. So I ran .109 SMP again.
> After a couple untar/rm tests, the errors came back. I forced a fsck and
> recompiled the kernel UP. So far under the UP kernel, the untar/rm test
> and several compiles yield no errors. So I'm guessing this might be a SMP
> issue.

Could you do a few tests for me? As it stands, you're the only one
reporting this so far, so..

The tests are roughly:
- can you disable IDE-DMA with hdparm? Does the problem go away? It so
happens that 2.1.103 stopped doing a nasty thing to the motherboard if
you happen to have a PPro or a Pentium II, and the nasty that it did
was to overwrite a DMA setup register. That was a bug for others, but
it might have been hiding another bug for you..
- can you try to pinpoint which kernel this started at for you? Your
first email said it seems to have started at 2.1.103, can you verify
that 2.1.102 indeed works for you even with SMP, but 2.1.103 does not,
or was the 2.1.103 just a rough guess?
- if it is indeed 2.1.103, can you check whether reverting the changes to
the IDE driver that happened between 2.1.102 and 103 makes a
difference?

If nothing else seems to make a difference, I'd also ask you to as a last
test check:

- use an older gcc instead of the egcs-1.0.3a compiler that you seem to
be using. Just to get one variation out of the picture.

I don't think this is a filesystem problem, or I'd have been getting a lot
more reports about it (and judging by how easily it happens to you I
should have seen it myself). But there have been occasional grumblings
about IDE DMA..

Mark, Gadi, any suggestions to try to either pinpoint the IDE driver or to
show that it isn't a driver issue?

Linus

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.altern.org/andrebalsa/doc/lkml-faq.html