RE: random failures with megaraid driver on 2.4.4 SMP

[Kelly Martin]

FYI, patching megaraid.c to disable 64-bit mode avoids the problem.
Apparently, the firmware provided by HP for this card is buggy in 64 bit
mode.  System has run stably for two weeks after applying the patch.
Contact me if you want the patch.  Thanks to Martti Hyppänen for the patch.

(Posted because I've received followup inquiries; please cc: replies.)

Kelly Martin
American Farm Bureau Federation
[e-mail]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Kelly Martin 
> Sent:	Thursday, June 07, 2001 12:40 PM
> To:	'[e-mail]'
> Subject:	random failures with megaraid driver on 2.4.4 SMP
> 
> I have an HP Netserver 1000r (dual Pentium 3) with a HP NetRAID-1M card
> running Linux 2.4.4 with the megaraid driver included in 2.4.4 that has
> twice now experienced kernel panics related to file system damage which
> appear to be caused by the megaraid driver going mad and scribbling
> randomly on the drive.  We have using this same driver with 2.2.x kernels
> on other uniprocessor machines with the same NetRAID card for over a year
> with no failures, so it seems likely that this is either a 2.4.x problem
> or an SMP problem with this driver.  
> 
> This machine is slated to become a production system and I do not have a
> similiarly-configured spare machine, so I am not going to pursue this
> problem at this time.  This card works fine under 2.2.x so we are going to
> use 2.2.19 on this machine for now.  However, doing so makes our second
> processor little more than a space heater.  I have not tried using other
> versions of the megaraid driver or kernels other than 2.4.4; I simply
> cannot spare the time right now.
> 
> I am not subscribed to the mailing list; please cc: replies.
> 
> Kelly Martin
> American Farm Bureau Federation
> [e-mail]
>