[KLUG Members] IBM ServeRAID problems

[Mike Slack]

Oh, yeah, to answer an earlier question from Adam, this card is NOT in an IBM system.

Mike

-- 
Mike Slack
mike@slacking.org
--
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't
be called research, would it?" --Albert Einstein

Mike Slack (mike@slacking.org) wrote:
> This is a response to a response I got about 3 weeks ago.  I've had no time to look into the details until very recently.
> 
> I checked /proc/pci and /proc/interrupts and noticed that the onboard scsi controller and the ServeRAID controller share an IRQ (this is after various fiddlings with the BIOS):
> 
> $ cat /proc/interrupts
>            CPU0       
>   0:    4718026          XT-PIC  timer
>   1:       1821          XT-PIC  keyboard
>   2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
>   5:          0          XT-PIC  es1370
>   6:         43          XT-PIC  floppy
>   8:     143799          XT-PIC  rtc
>  10:      18285          XT-PIC  eth0
>  11:      55523          XT-PIC  aic7xxx, ips
>  12:       4969          XT-PIC  PS/2 Mouse
> NMI:          0 
> ERR:          0
> 
> (It doesn't look like there are any memory address conflicts of any kind)  I read somewhere that a shared IRQ might cause hangs (even though in theory it shouldn't; the problems I am having always occur during I/O intensive operations like tape backups or opening large files, etc.).  The root partition is mounted on a disk on the onboard controller, and all other mounts (including /home) are on the ips controller.  Most peripherals (including tape, CDROM) are on the onboard controller.  So it looks to me like this is a good candidate for the source of the problems (they always occur when both controllers are doing intensive operations).  Unfortunately, I haven't been able to test my theory, since I can't seem to set separate IRQs for aic7xxx and ips no matter what I do.  I can set the ips IRQ from the BIOS, but whatever I set it to, aic7xxx follows (or doesn't get loaded at all).  Am I missing something here?  Or is this even something I should be trying?  Any other suggest!
> ions?
> 


> Adam Williams (awilliam@whitemice.org) wrote:

 (snip)

> > Every IPS problem I've has has boiled down to hardware.  Are you using
> > an IBM system?  I've noticed they conflict with other devices pretty
> > frequently on non-IBM systems (most of the systems I have them in). 
> > Otherwise they are great cards.
 
 (snip)