Re: Problem: IDE data corruption with VIA chipsets on 2.4.20-19.8+others

From: Resident Boxholder
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 19:11:46 EST


VIA KT333
VIA KT400
SiS 745

The problem definately occurs on 2.4.20-19.8

B> I saw that on VIA KT266 k2.6.0-test5 and it
seems to go away if I use anticipatory scheduling
instead of deadline scheduling in kernel config and
don't use aggressive mem settings in cmos, and USB
on a server what's that for?

Did you flash all your bioses before trying anything?
I saw acpi-derivative problems go away after flashing
an award bios on another server. It seems there was
no graceful fail or default when acpi id info is not
in bios, so improvement was drastic. ACPI problems
cause USB to go clunk when ide is active, and downstream
conflicts like that are not too informative or productive
to look at if flashing the bios would "fix the code" as
if by magic.

-Bob


Eric Bickle wrote:

....
RedHat Linux 8....two IDE
80gig hard-drives in a Software RAID-1... they all crash, they all
run RedHat Linux, and they all use IDE.

We also get various IDE errors in the /var/log files, such as: (also another
weird IRQ error - except we're running a stock config! (ie/ no PCI devices
other than one NIC... No idea if they're related to the IDE thing <sigh>.
The IRQ thing appears to be USB related)
== during server runtime ==
kernel: hdc: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
kernel: hdc: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=150637065,
sector=150636992
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 16:01 (hdc), sector 150636992
kernel: hdc: dma_intr: status=0x53 { DriveReady SeekComplete Index Error }
kernel: hdc: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=150630007,
sector=150629920
kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev 16:01 (hdc), sector 150629920
== during server boot ==
kernel: usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3
kernel: hub.c: USB hub found
kernel: hub.c: 2 ports detected
kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 3 for device 00:10.2
kernel: IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.0, have irq 9, want irq 3
kernel: IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.1, have irq 9, want irq 3
kernel: IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.2, have irq 9, want irq 3
kernel: IRQ routing conflict for 00:10.3, have irq 9, want irq 3
kernel: usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0x9400, IRQ 9

Usually after that happens (the IDE errors) it will crash fairly soon. Other
times no errors are logged but the server is *extremely* slow - likely due
to disk performance. My guess is that there is some sort of internal IDE
error (A "CorrectableError"?) that the kernel is recovering from and not
writing a message to the log.

Once and awhile after a major kernel panic or reboot, the system refused to
reboot at all, going into an endless cycle of disk checking. We tried
various brand-name ram suppliers in case it was a ram corruption - no luck.
Everything points to IDE.

We tried various motherboards, including the following chipsets:
VIA KT333
VIA KT400
SiS 745

The problem definately occurs on 2.4.20-19.8, but also some earlier kernel
versions as well (which I can't remember). It only happens during extremely
high disk usage (I've seen it fail with about 8% CPU and Memory Usage...)
It's not our database server - it runs fine on our older "BX-Boards" (the
older 300mhz intels) and on various Windows NT/2000 boxes. The configuration
of the database server is exactially the same as on the other servers (I
double checked at least 5 times...)

After about 4 months of random server crashes and corruption, various trials
and testing, I'm fairly certain it must be a hardware interaction between
the IDE hard-drives and the Linux kernel. We've gone through 20 IDE
hard-drives that work fine and look fine after the crashes - definately not
a physical hard-drive problem. Definately not a motherboard problem because
we've been through 4 different motherboards, different manufacturers and 3
different chipsets.

Ideas..? Help..? :( The clients are going to be banging down the doors any
day if we don't get operational servers, and so far the only solution that I
believe works 100% is to install Windows (doh). As a last resort I'm asking
to see if any of you Kernel-gurus have ideas :-)

Thanks,
-Eric Bickle

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