Janne Himanka wrote:
>
> We have a dual PII with 8 4.3GB Cheetahs in two uw scsi channels. I
> used to run it with kernel 2.2.3, a root disk, spare disk and a raid5
> partition composed of 6 disks. The raid5 partition worked otherwise
> well, but within 6 months it lost its superblock three times, once in
> a UPS failure, twice from no apparent reason. I had to do mkraid -f -o
> on it. I grew tired of this and decided to try a newer kernel and raid
> version and 0+1 raid.
>
> So I installed kernel 2.2.11, the 19990824 kernel patches and
> corresponding raid tools (0.90). I configured two raid0 partitions,
> each with three disks, and then one raid1 partition on top of
> these. It seemed to run nicely, benchmarks were good and no
> glitches. But in a few days the system began showing signs of running
> out of memory. It has 512MB RAM, but even a small load would make it
> swap. Ps output showed no memory hogs, so it seems it was some part of
> kernel that was leaking. The kernel configuration didn't have anything
> special except raid. I had all raid options enabled in the
> kernel. After rebooting everything was fine, but it deteriorated in a
> week or so to unusable.
That's bad... I'm not sure of a good way to track it down, but perhaps
Ingo or somebody will have some insight on good ways to check on that.
>
> I tried to upgrade to kernel 2.3.39, older raid and two raid0
> partitions without raid1, but could find no raidtools version that
> would work with the 2.3.39 kernel. Am i supposed to patch the latest
> 2.3 kernels? With what, and what raidtools to use with them? The raid
> and md HOWTOs are very old and even the raidtools docs are vague.
>
> How about kernel 2.2.14? It wouldn't patch with the 19990824 stuff.
> I find the interplay of kernel, kernel patch and raidtools versions
> very confusing. What is considered a stable combination, preferably
> with 2.2.14 or latest 2.3 kernels?
Personally, I don't run the 2.3.x kernels, I don't want to spend that
kind of time seeing if things work. All of the machines that I use a
lot are running 2.2.14, and my RAID machine (running a two disk stripe
set) runs 2.2.14 with Ingo's patches. You can download the 2.2.14 patch
here:
http://www.redhat.com/~mingo/raid-2.2.14-B1
So far, things work properly (now that I've tracked down the bad blocks
thing). Good luck,
Greg
