5.4-RC2 freezing - ATA related?

[Brent Casavant]

On Tue, 17 May 2005, Dominic Marks wrote:

> I've got four machines with ICH5/6 chips in, no stability problems whatsoever, 
> and thats been the case since I installed them, around 5.2.1. Perhaps it is 
> something to do with your workload, or another piece of hardware in the 
> system. The machines do a lot of disc i/o so during their working days.

Not so much so in this case.  It was being used only as a workstation,
completely idle when I wasn't sitting in front of it.  While it would
occasionally lock up while in active use, that was relatively rare
compared to the frequent hangs just after 3AM.

I do agree it could be some other piece of hardware, but the fact that
at least two of us have identical problems, often triggered by the same
event (nightly periodic runs), starts to point in the direction of a
software bug.

I can't say for certain that downgrading to 4.x solved the problem as I
needed to do that install on a SCSI drive instead, in order to preserve
the contents of the filesystem on the ATA drive until I could transfer
everything over.

If I remember correctly (forgive me, this was about a year ago), I
ran a number of disk performance benchmarks and other general stress
tests on the ATA drive, and never was able to manually trigger the
hang.

Anecdotally, a friend of mine who recently tried 5.3 ran into frequent
filesystem/drive problems as well, which reverting to 4.x solved.
However it didn't sound like exactly the same problem.

Brent

-- 
Brent Casavant			http://www.angeltread.org/
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