Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 04:16:12 +0100 (CET) From: Mattias Sandgren <mattias@leif.silicon.nu> To: AIC7XXX Mail List <aic7xxx@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Unresponsive system Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9911020343380.28840-100000@leif.silicon.nu>
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Hello, I've got an Adaptec 2940UW and and a Quantum Fireball 4.3GB U-SCSI drive. There is something strange with the disk: doing large, long duration writes to the disk makes my system grind to a halt until the transfers are done. The mouse and keyboard are useless and X won't update. Typically I use bonnie but high speed ftp/nfs (MBit speeds) induces the problem as well. The machine is a dual PII Mendocino at 450MHz with 128 MB memory. I've tried a lot of kernel versions (most 2.2.x and some 2.3.x) with the stock aic7xxx driver and the problem is there. Different block-sizes and inode-counts on the partitions, any kernel and aic7xxx driver, little or a lot of memory - it doesn't matter. I've tried fiddeling with different command queue lenghts as well - to no avail. I recently purchased two IBM Ultrastar disks (LVD but using them as UW) and started experimenting a little. The first thing I did was adding two swap partitions on the new drives and stopped using the swap partition on the Fireball. Result: The system felt a lot more responsive. Of course the Ultrastar disks are fast but the main benefit was that the mouse pointer and the keyboard was usable again when swapping takes place. Next thing I did was create one large stripe using one partition from each Ultrastar disk. The first thing I did was executing a bonnie run. And it went so WELL. X didn't freeze and I could easily use the system while bonnie was running despite having the swap partitions on the same two drives. What is the problem with the Fireball disk?! Is there some problem with in combining it with the controller? The BIOS is 1.34.3 which I believe is the most recent. The card was purchased in late 1996. I've tried several ATA disks as well and they don't exhibit any problems either. The system remains usable with them. Follow this link to see logs and output: http://leif.silicon.nu/mattias/diskproblem/ Regards Mattias -- Mattias Sandgren - mailto:sagge@acc.umu.se http://www.acc.umu.se/~sagge Computer Science and Engineering Student - University of Umea, Sweden. One of them unix geeks. ( ( ( (( In Stereo Where Available )) ) ) ) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe aic7xxx" in the body of the message
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