On Tue, 13 Apr 1999, Doug Ledford wrote:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > You'll find no vendor ships 2.0.x SMP kernels. Prior to the interrupt
> > re-entry fix in 2.0.36 final (which predates pretty much all the vendors
> > last 2.0 based trees) 2.0.* was not sufficiently stable SMP for all uses. You
> > needed the right drivers you needed the right options.
> >
> > Thats my opinion. but then I'm only to 2.0 tree maintainer 8)
>
> And, let's not forget that until about 2 months ago here internally we
> could take down any 2.0 SMP system with aic7xxx hardware simply by
> putting a BusLogic next to the aic7xxx driver and using both in
> parallel. It wasn't until my 5.1.12 driver that this one was fixed and
> this was a disk corrupting, file system eating problem. It's hard for
> us to think something is supportable when we have that kind of problem
> with it. The fact that Robert doesn't see this on the Dell 2300
> machines he has is because A) the PowerEdge 2300 machines are actually
> very nice, well done hardware and B) he's using exclusively aic7xxx
> hardware. Just don't ever mix another SCSI controller in one of those
> system Robert or you'll be hosing your filesystems.
Moral of the story, never argue with the Big Guys;-) They Know More than
you do...
Still, by carefully (but entirely accidentally:-) avoiding mixing
buslogics and adaptec hardware for the last three years, I've only hosed
a single disk (outside of playing with early 5.1.x drivers on the 7890,
which hosed them right and left for a while:-) with linux 2.0.x SMP, and
that was with 2.0.0 and a 2940 with a Bad Bios (tm Adaptec, which really
liked to ship a different BIOS on every board in those days).
I'm one of your biggest fans (both of you) and please don't interpret my
arguments on this thread as anything personal.
If I were running Red Hat, which I'm not, I'd do things differently,
that's all.
rgb
Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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