IDE lockups - Was: ext2 filesystem lockups

[João Carlos Mendes Luís]

Markus Trippelsdorf wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 19:35 -0300, João Carlos Mendes Luís wrote:
> 
>>David O'Brien wrote:
>>
>>>On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 04:29:19PM +0100, Markus Trippelsdorf wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>When copying large files to a locally mounted ext2 filesystem
>>>>my system always locks up.
>>>>Is this a known problem in 64bit mode?
>>
>>Just curious: what is the drive interface with the ext2fs?  IDE?
> 
> 
> Yes, it's the normal IDE interface (ATA UDMA133 drive).

     Could you please test it under UFS, just for debugging purposes? 
My experience shows that it needs a very large dataset to make the 
system freeze.  My last lock up happened during the pre-downgrade 
backup, which means copying 200G from one disk to the other on the same 
IDE interface.  Your mileage may vary.

     A question for the list: Is there an official "maintainer" for 
IDE/ATA interface?  What kind of debugging could we do to help?

>>The very same hardware is now on 32-bit mode FreeBSD 5.3-stable, without 
>>any problems at all.
>>
>>
>>>>Which filesystem is recommended for multi-OS file exchange?  
>>>
>>>I've heard enought reports of ext2 problems on 32-bit i386, that I don't
>>>trust it in situations that "have to work".  By far the most widely
>>>supported FS is vfat32 [mount_msdosfs(8)].
>>
>>The last time I had to use msdosfs, on 4.* it was extremely slow 
>>compared to UFS on the same disk.  Did this get better on 5.*?
> 
> I want to use the filesystem for my music collection, so I'm willing to
> trade fastness for reliability.

     If you use only linux and BSD, choose ext2fs or ufs depending on 
which OS you use most.  If you need windows, then you must choose 
between msdosfs or ext2fs, since I do not yet know about an UFS driver 
for windows.