UDMA problems?

Leandro Dybal Bertoni (dybal@upe.org.br)
Wed, 23 Dec 1998 12:25:56 -0200


We have been getting some trouble with a machine with this configuration:

Motherboard: Abit AB-AH6 (http://www.abit.com.tw/html/ah6.htm)
Processor: Pentium II 233Mhz
Chipset: Intel 440LX
IDE Interface: Intel 82371AB PIIX4 (rev 1)
Bios: Award Modular BIOS v4.51 PG

We tried kernels 2.0.36 and 2.1.130.
We got the trouble symptoms (b) faster with 2.1.130 :-)
--------------------------------------------------------
Symptoms:

a) sometimes e2fsck of the root partition at boot time would freeze the
machine (no HD activity, it just sits there until we reset);
b) sometimes the machine would freeze: no network, no keyboard, no signal of
activity;
c) sometimes we would get corrputed data files (when we were testing
an Oracle instalation)

As far as we can guess, it is a problem with the use of UDMA.

For a test case, we were importing some data into an Oracle database using 20M
of RAM (so we would get a lot of swapping). It froze the machine every time
until we run 'hdparm -d 0' on every disk at boot time (before the root
partition fsck)

If anybody want to look into this, feel free to e-mail us for more info, run
patches, etc.

Leandro Dybal Bertoni
Agencia Estado

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