2.1.8* kernels and md raid0

Isaac Connor (iconnor@pc-40947.on.rogers.wave.ca)
Sun, 8 Mar 1998 22:46:48 -0500 (EST)


I have a question about the currnt stability of MD RAID0. The reason I
ask is that since implementing it, I have experienced serious
instability, and finaly complete utter an total filesystem corruption in
the space of 48 hours uptime. (Fresh install to complete crap in 48
hours). I am trying to determine whether the md code is at fault, or
perhaps if using it has revealed a problem with my hardware. I am just
curious if others use this and find it stable. Here is my system:

Tyan Tomcat IIID
2 p200
48M EDO ram.
Buslogic bt958 SCSI
Glibc 206 based system, 2.1.8* kernels (I tried several).

md setup
I have an ide 2.0Gb IDE Western Digital Caviar series HD on hdb
I have a Seagate 2.1Gb SCSI HD on sda

Using e2fsprogs 1.10, and I tried the WIP 1.12 version.

The problems I have are:
random hard lock. This occurs more often under small load, and serious
stress tests do not even touch the system, it grinds through the worst
load I can give it (several make -j compile, X, Netscape, millions of
xterms, playing mp3s, etc.
Filesystem corruption. The seriousness and extent of corruption is
proportional to the uptime. Even no load causes corruption. From a
fresh slackware install, boot, build of raidtools, creation of md0,
moving usr and home to the raid0 disk, reboot, and 5 minutes of uptime,
upon the next reboot, there is serious corruption, and upon fscking
manually, there are files in lost+found that are screwed. Undeelteable,
modes of 12312312, sizes over terabytes and as small as 0bytes. Device
files modes using almost all letters of the alphabet, you get the
picture.

So you get the idea, serious problems. This machine has been stable
under various 2.1 kernels for about a year now, but in the last 2 weeks,
it is nearly useless. Diagnostics on my hardware turn up nothing, but I
am tempted to think that it is either hardware or MD. Please give me
your thoughts.

BTW, through all of this there is no debugging info in the logs, etc.
The hard locks I mentioned leave no trace. They are running happily, and
then the machine just stops, no ping, etc. This is all under X, XFree
3.3.1 compile for glibc.

I can't think of anything else to give for info. Thank you for spending
time reading this.

Isaac Connor
iconnor@uwaterloo.ca

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