Re: sata_mv important note

[Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@gmail.com>]

On 1/17/06, Sebastian Kuzminsky <seb@highlab.com> wrote:
> Arkadiusz Miskiewicz <arekm@pld-linux.org> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 17 January 2006 17:24, Sebastian Kuzminsky wrote:
> > > Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com> wrote:
> > > > For sata_mv users, you should be aware of three things:
> > > >
> > > > 1) The Marvell driver is experimental, and not yet considered ready for
> > > > production use.  As Kconfig notes: HIGHLY EXPERIMENTAL.
> > >
> > > Right, understood.
> >
> > I'm using:
> >
> > 03:03.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6041=20
> > 4-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 07)
> >
> > but with http://www.keffective.com/mvsata/FC3/mvSata-3.4.2a-patched.tbz driver
> > and it works nicely (+ 2.8GHz Xeon HT, smp kernel). I was quite suprised to
> > see that there are no problems with it in typical usage (while I'm sure that
> > this driver is far away from kernel standards).
>
> I'm using:
>
> 0000:02:01.0 IDE interface: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 09)
>
> I'm running the stock 2.6.15 kernel & the in-kernel driver.  I have four
> disks on this controller.  The controller and disks seem perfectly stable,
> I've been running four parallel "badblocks -n" processes (one on each
> disk) for almost 5 days now.  Using the disks as PVs in LVM works fine,
> and building a RAID-6 out of them also works fine.
>
> But when I build a RAID-6 out of them, and use the array as a PV
> for LVM, the system locks up within seconds (no errors, no sysrq,
> no CapsLock-blinky, no network-pingy).  This behavior is perfectly
> repeatable.

Have you tried using "nmi_watchdog=1" kernel parameter?

> The problem goes away and everything works if I turn on all the debugging
> options in the kernel config (but I dont get any debug output from
> the kernel).

Could you find the specific option which makes the hang go away?

Bartlomiej