On Thu, Jan 26, 2006 at 10:47:22PM -0800, Bill MacAllister wrote: > I probably would not be futzing around with this system at all if it was > stable. Even though I can boot a 2.4.28 smp kernel and a 2.6.8 generic > kernel, neither is stable. The system kernel panicked in the middle of the > day again today. I have been fighting stability problems since I left the > last official Red Hat release, 7.2. > > This system sits next to PWS 600 running OpenVMS. Last summer in > frustration I swapped the disks and booted the 4100 as a VMS system and the > PWS as a Linux system. The instability problems followed the software. > The only thing that seemed to bring the VMS system down was when the power > failed a couple of times. Not to say I haven't seen VMS systems accvio > themselves into oblivion, but at least you can set them to restart > themselves when they get lost in the weeds. It would be helpful if Linux > would report the problem and then restart itself. Maybe this is a option I > don't know about? > > Then I thought that I had figured the problem several months ago when I > noticed that moving the old 8 gig disks on to a separate controller from > the 70 and 140 gig disks seemed to work better. But, it only got better > never really stable. Still kernel panics now and again. > > I have seen notes about qLogic problems. This system now has two qLogic > controllers in it. I don't have log files or debugging output it does seem > like this is a qLogic problem. Currently the system seems to have problems > when it gets busy. I thought that with 2.6 the driver was supposed to be > supported again. > > So, what are the options for SRM visible PCI controllers? With a 2.4 > kernel I had boot problems with a TekRam controller I tried. Maybe I > should try the TekRam again in 2.6? > > What other options are there? I thought maybe it would make sense to put > an Adaptec controller in the system and put the bulk of the data out there > with a minimal amount of the system on qLogic served disk. Or maybe an > AlphaBIOS boot? It has been forever since I have looked at AlphaBIOS on > these systems, but I remember that from AlphaBIOS you can see Adaptec > controllers. If I tried that I would have to use MILO to boot, right? Is > that reasonable to try? > > I certainly wish I had any experience at looking at driver level code. It > is really frustrating to have such fine hardware, even if a bit dated, be > unusable because of this one software problem when the rest of the system > seems to work fine. > > Bill > >
Put an LSI logic/Symbios card in there - I believe a 53c875 will boot fine in that machine and it willl work a lot better than those qlogic cards. Mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
