DAC960 on IA/64

Hi Leonard,

I have made a very small step forward in debugging the problems. After reading this message from Linux to the LK mailinglist
<http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0107.2/0533.html>
I suspected that SMP may have something to do with it.

So I repeated our test with the stock RedHat UP kernel (2.4.3), and with much less catastrophic results. I got no more hanging processes, no system crash, "just" some data errors that suggest that 18 512-byte blocks in a 2GB file were pointing at a wrong disk area (there were valid bit patterns there, but patterns that should appear elsewhere in the file).

This may look like a VFS or ext2-related problem, but similar tests on other controllers have revealed nothing of the kind.

Interestingly, the driver also reported
no "vendor-specific" or other errors during the test.

I cannot exclude 100% that this test went better than the previous tests simply by "luck", but it seems unlikely, because the system survived 12 hours of heavy copy-compare whereas it always showed uninterruptibly sleeping processes or even total crashes after ca. 5 hours with SMP.

Hope that helps a bit, regards,
Martin

Martin Wilck     <[email protected]>
FSC EP PS DS1, Paderborn      Tel. +49 5251 8 15113