[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID woes

[Kurt Watkins]

On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Scott Ripley wrote:

> I was looking through bp6.com last night, and that prompted me to
> upgrade my BIOS to the NJ revision. It didn't help, but I probably
> needed it anyway. I have browsed the linux-smp and linux-kernel mailing

It makes substantial improvements to memory bandwidth, of particular interest
to us celery users with larger working set sizes;-)

> lists for hours. Of the few people who I saw having problems with RAID
> on a BP6, it was all something they were doing wrong. They were, except
> for 2 people, using the 2.2 kernels. Most of the time they were missing
> a patch. Those code snippets seem to be present in the 2.3 kernels.
> Also, most were mostly running RedHat, which comes with the updated
> tools, I believe.

Right, RH is shipping with 2.2.x patched for raidtools-0.90. This makes RH a
nice place to fetch patches against 2.2 for 0.90.

> I am using MPS 1.4. I am using the 2.3 kernels mostly because the SMP
> seems to work better. It was a bonus that I didn't have to patch it for

Much.

> the HPT366. The real reason is I'm a revision junkie. I just have to
> recompile my kernel every week or so to get my Linux fix. ;^9 If I were
> to use the 2.2 kernel, I would have to patch for RAID support as well.

But that shouldn't be too bad if you have to do it.

> Alot of what I read last night was talking about the broken RAID code in
> 2.2. I could do that if I were desperate, but that would be admitting
> defeat. :)

:-(
 
> The more I think about it, the more I believe I need to find the updated
> tools. Everything works fine until I run mdadd and mdrun. The site that

Try:

http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/daemons/raid/alpha/raidtools-19990824-0.90.tar.gz

BTW, alan offers that the recent ide patches (referenced at the HPT site) fix
up the known IDE hanging problems. Dunno if these have found their way into your
kernel du jour.

Cheers,
K.