More Intel ICH5 SATA150 hangs

David Kelly dkelly at HiWAAY.net
Sat Oct 30 18:24:12 PDT 2004


On Oct 30, 2004, at 7:32 PM, Louis LeBlanc wrote:

> On 10/29/04 10:54 PM, David Kelly sat at the `puter and typed:
>>
>> I turned off HT on my Dell PE400SC (uses Intel ICH5 chipset) almost
>> instantly after installing FreeBSD. Partitioning and labeling my SATA
>> drives went just fine. System is on a PATA drive. Even striping the 
>> two
>> SATA drives with Vinum followed by newfs was fine. System locked hard
>> the instant I actually tried to use the SATA drives. Reformatted
>> without vinum and had similar lock/panic. This was possibly 5.2.1-p10.
>> Have darn near the latest 5.3 on it now and its running nicely w/o HT.
>>
>> Pretty sure ULE was the scheduler being used when I had problems as I
>> remember when SCHED_4BSD was the new default. IMO, when it worked, ULE
>> ran smoother. Now it seems that one process can hog the filesystem
>> resources and block out another doing the exact same thing but to
>> another file.
>>
>> That instance with HT was the first and only time FreeBSD messed up a
>> filesystem and I've had at least one FreeBSD machine running 24/7 
>> since
>> 2.0.0-RELEASE. As a result I'm not much in the mood to re-enable HT 
>> now
>> that I have real data on the drives.
>
> This is a bit disconcerting.  That implies that 5.2 isn't SMP stable.

Nobody with authority ever stated 5.x was stable in any form or 
fashion. I'm using it because if that box blows up it won't really be 
any skin of my nose. Meanwhile the fact it has had some problems has in 
some small way contributed toward getting them fixed.

For example, vinum panics at boot if autostarted, but gvinum does not.

As for SMP, its my understanding thats what the entire 5.x series is 
all about. Massive changes for SMP. Its also the root of the design 
philosophy disagreement that spurred the creation of Dragonfly. Only 
time will tell which, or both, are right. Meanwhile both are working on 
different paths toward improving SMP performance.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.



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