On 05/16/2010 02:56 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 1:32 PM, walt<w41...@gmail.com> wrote:
On 05/16/2010 10:56 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
I have a newish high-end machine here that's causing me some problems
with RAID, but looking at log files and dmesg I don't think the
problem is actually RAID and more likely udev. I'm looking for some
ideas on how to debug this.
The hardware:
Asus Rampage II Extreme
Intel Core i7-980x
12GB DRAM
5 WD5002ABYS RAID Edition 500GB drives
I had an asus mobo that turned out to be great in the long run, but a few
of its newer hardware gadgets took months to be well-supported by linux.
I'm thinking (completely guessing :) it sounds like a driver that's not
setting some bit properly in a hardware register during boot.
That turned out to be a problem with the network chip on my asus, which
randomly didn't work after reboots. Finally the driver got fixed after
I whined a thousand times to the driver maintainer at Broadcom :)
It very well could be something like that. I had a Compaq laptop a few
years ago which had an ATI chipset in it and which took a long time to
get DMA working on the hard drive controller to it was very slow for
the first few months.
The thing about this is that it's a single 6 port SATA controller in
an Intel chipset, albeit because it's the newer chipsets with the
newest processor (6 cores, 12 threads) it likely hasn't been seen by
too many people yet.
Let's assume you're right? I've been trying to determine how udev goes
about finding the actual hard drives and assigning them device names.
Is there a way that I can get udev to log what it's doing? Any sort of
debug messages I can get it to print in a log file somewhere?
It is a flaky problem and strangely it doesn't always miss every
partition on a given drive. For instance /dev/md3, md5 and md11
3-drive RAID1 arrays. You'd think if it was the controller failing it
would fail for all the partitions on a given drive, but it doesn't. It
might find sda3 for md3 but miss sda5 for md5. Strange.
Hm. Is this your motherboard?:
http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=W7i5W4Pw4fH22Mih
Being a geek of a certain age, I find that products with names that invoke
mega-dose anabolic steroids usually don't fit my lifestyle very well.
I do better with product names that contain more sedate character strings
like VSOP or MOM.
By grepping through /usr/src/linux*/MAINTAINERS I turned up quite a few
email addresses at intel.com, none of which seem relevant to RAID or its
device drivers, but a polite email asking for a link to the appropriate
dev might bring a polite and useful reply. That's how I connected with
the appropriate dev at Broadcom, who eventually fixed my ethernet driver.
