Mailing List Archive

For your information if you haven't seen it. I can't comment on the
problem described here; I'm only passing it on as a possible warning.

Regards,
Ferris

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Will Simoneau <simoneau@ele.uri.edu>
To: sparclinux@vger.kernel.org
Subject: 2.6.17 + sym53c876 causes many i/o errors
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 13:56:56 -0400

I just tried out 2.6.17 on my U80 (4x450, 2560MB), which boots off the
onboard SCSI card (Symbios 53c876) from a sw raid1 of 2 disks. The disks
are original Sun UW-SCSI Seagate 18G 10k disks, internal cabling is all
original. Filesystem is ext3 with dir_index on. Distro is Gentoo,
running ~sparc.

Result: many I/O errors, leading to some filesystem corruption! I was
lucky to notice and quickly go back to 2.6.15 and run a full fsck, which
found some problems. One of the disks was marked failed by the raid1
driver, since it was returning lots of errors... it looks like the raid1
driver didn't give up as easily on the last disk, allowing the machine
to still function.

The old kernel is 2.6.15-gentoo-r7 installed via portage. Toolchain and
utility versions from ver_linux:

Gnu C 3.4.6
Gnu make 3.81
binutils 2.16.1
util-linux 2.12r
mount 2.12r
module-init-tools 3.2.2
e2fsprogs 1.38
reiserfsprogs 3.6.19
xfsprogs 2.7.11
quota-tools 3.13.
PPP 2.4.3
Linux C Library so.6 .> libc
Dynamic linker (ldd) 2.3.6
Procps 3.2.6
Net-tools 1.60
Kbd 1.12
Sh-utils 5.96
udev 090

This is obviously a really dangerous bug, whatever it is, as it will
easily cause corruption on the root filesystem before booting is finished. Both SCSI channels on the dual channel card return errors easily. This wasn't a
problem on 2.6.15.

Full kernel log from 2.6.17 boot to shutdown, and .config are attached.
This kernel is gentoo-sources-2.6.17 from portage, let me know if you
need a list of patches that are included.

BTW, I can't fiddle much with this machine besides testing a couple
patches. Doing a bisect to find the bad patch is out of the question.

What gives?
--
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)