Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 01:20:23 GMT From: Rich Wales <richw@richw.org> To: freebsd-i386@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: i386/103435: Kernel appears somewhat deadlocked during heavy ATA I/O (post-August 4th) Message-ID: <200610080120.k981KNub039368@freefall.freebsd.org>
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The following reply was made to PR i386/103435; it has been noted by GNATS. From: Rich Wales <richw@richw.org> To: Rich Wales <richw@richw.org> Cc: bug-followup@FreeBSD.org, freebsd@jdc.parodius.com Subject: Re: i386/103435: Kernel appears somewhat deadlocked during heavy ATA I/O (post-August 4th) Date: Sat, 07 Oct 2006 18:11:06 -0700 Per a suggestion from Søren Schmidt, I rechecked my hardware and my BIOS settings. After a bunch of experimentation, I found that if I disabled PCI master burst mode in the BIOS setup, the timeout problems all went away. Disk I/O speed was -- not surprisingly -- noticeably slower with burst mode turned off, but the system was stable and reliable. I'm not sure if the primary culprit here is my Promise card or my motherboard, but it does suggest that some systems with iffy PCI bus tolerances might require suboptimal BIOS settings in order to work properly with some Promise controllers. As for whether any effective steps can be taken in the driver to make it more robust against this problem, I'll have to leave that to people who are more familiar with the hardware and the code. Rich Wales richw@richw.org http://www.richw.org
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