Panics with 5-stable - vinum? raid5?

[Michael L. Squires]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 daniel at flipse.org wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I have carried out extensive hardware tests and most of the hardware
> (including most of the memory, the cpu and main board) have already been
> replaced but this makes no difference to stability. I also believe this issue
> was already there when running 4-STABLE. I have tried out the new geom feature
> and gvinum but crashes where more frequent and panic dumps were specifically
> mentioning vinum, so I turned back to non-geom vinum (which also has a
> significantly higher performance).

I tried 5.3-STABLE with vinum and gvinum and had a number of crashes with 
a Supermicro P4DC6 dual 1.8GHZ Xeon/512MB, RAID 1 boot device using the 
Adaptec 2005S + onboard SCSI, Compaq OEM Adaptec 39160 (flashed to Adaptec 
v 2.57 BIOS), 8 Seagate 43GB drives in a RAID 5 array.

I dropped back to 4.11-STABLE, same hardware, no crashes.  I had two 
processes copying 150GB from an NFS-mounted volume to the RAID 5 array for 
several days.

On the other hand I'm running 5.3-STABLE on a Toshiba 8100 notebook and 
dual PIII/Supermicro P6DGH which have been rock solid.

I personally would not use the 8139 Ethernet cards in a server (see "man 
rl" or read the code, the author of the driver obviously thinks the 8139 
chipset is a horrible kludge.  I personally use only Intel Pro100 and 
variants (the P4DC6 has one built in).

(I can't tell you if the problems I had were hardware (I did change memory 
at one point, but that didn't solve the problem), some configuration 
mistake I made, or bugs triggered by my hardware version (I do have HTT 
turned off).

Mike Squires