Re: Adaptec SCSI driver lockups

[Luc Lalonde]

Hello stefan,

Thanks for your note.  I've recompiled the 2.4.7pre6 with the old adaptec
drivers (sorry Justin).  I just need to get this system stable again.
It's at the point where I can't take a vacation this summer until I feel
the system is stable.

I didn't have the fsck problems I'm using XFS and ReiserFS.  If this does
not fix the problem I'm likely to connect a serial console to figure out
the problem.

On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Stefan Jaschke wrote:

> On Thursday 12 July 2001 23:21, Luc Lalonde wrote:
> > Hello folks,
> >
> > I'm having trouble identifying wether I'm having hardware or software(
> > OS ) problems.  For the past couple of Months I've been having system
> > lockups every 10 days or so.
>
> I had a similar problem with an Adaptec AHA-29160 (AIC-7892) when
> doing transfers from a SCSI DVD-drive to SCSI hard disk. It was actually
> very annoying since
>  - I did an update to SuSE 7.2
>  - it almost destroyed my installation (several runs of e2fsck needed, some
>     libs broken after the crash)
>  - the SCSI bus hang appeared not immediatly, but after several minutes
>    of activity.
> I tried:
> (1) to load aic7xxx_old (see
>  http://sdb.suse.de/de/sdb/html/ostoelt_aic7xxx_old.html) -> crashed also.
> (2) I tried to disable tagged command queuing or set "tag_info" to
>  more moderate values since I noticed that the queue length was set
>  to an incredible length of 253. However, the new driver from Adaptec
>  just ignores the old kernel parameters.
> (3) According to an SDB article
>  (http://sdb.suse.de/de/sdb/html/jsj_29160_interrupt.html),
>  I manually set all PCI slots to different interrupts (but I could not set
>  the interrupt of the graphics card). -> crashed also
> (4) I finally managed to get a workable system again by booting with a 2.2.x
>  kernel (SuSE 7.1), copying the DVD to a hard disk and then install from the
>  hard disk.
> (5) I compiled a custom kernel and set the queue length parameter to 8. The
>  system now appears to be stable with the new (!) driver.
>
> My guess is: the new driver stresses the hardware more than the old driver.
> And it may at least partly be a hardware problem involving slow devices.
> (The same configuration that consistently crashed my DVD->HD transfers did
> not crash in an hour of very heavy HD->HD transfers.)
>
> And here is a hint for the developers. Before the driver went into an endless
> loop of SCSI bus resets, it said something like "locking queue length to 64
> for device 0:0:0" (the HD that the data was copied to).
>
> Hope this helps,
> Stefan J.
>
> --
> Stefan R. Jaschke <[e-mail]>
> http://www.jaschke-net.de
>