Disk I/O-related panics in 6.0-RELEASE?

[Brian Tao]

On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Vivek Khera wrote:
>
> All hardware is not created the same.... Last year I went through 5
> motherboards, two full systems, lots of RAM sticks, yada yada yada,
> all to get *one* stable server out of it.  Needless to say, I don't
> buy that vendor anymore.

    Just wanted to followup on this thread.  I initially tried Kris
Kennaway's software-based suggestions (don't use ULE, don't use
QUOTAS, don't run bg fsck) before going the hardware route.  Those had
no effect.  I suspected flakey RAM to be the most likely culprit, so I
replaced the two sticks of OCZ DIMMs with equivalent ones from
Kingston.  Although I should not have been anywhere close to the
capacity of the power supply (should have been plenty left on both the
5V and 12V rails), I took all but two drives offline, and also pulled
out the Promise TX-4 SATA card, just in case.

    Now, so far so good with both 6.0p4 and 6.1-RC.  The machine
easily gets through a 48-hour period of continuous make buildworlds
and buildkernels, whereas before it would panic during the first or
second iteration.  I'm fairly sure it is the RAM and not the TX-4 or
power draw from the drives, but I'll have to schedule a maintenance
window to test that.

    Thanks all for pointing me in the right direction!
-- 
Brian Tao, Luxography
http://www.luxography.ca/ (main)
http://blog.luxography.ca/ (blog)
"The art of light"