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SubjectRe: IDE tape and SMP
On Mon, 26 Oct 1998, Andre M. Hedrick wrote:

>
> Find an poke this in as an initial test...........
>
> I find that this works on 2/4 chipsets that I have to test with under SMP.
> PDC20246 appears to stablize but no DMA transefers are allowed.
> HPT343 (unreleased chipset specific) appears to stablize with Fast-ATA
> enabled, but no DMA transefers are allowed.
(text deleted)
> Cheers,
> Andre Hedrick
> The IDE-FNG for Linux
> The APC UPS Specialist for Linux
>
> http://www.dyer.vanderbilt.edu/server/udma/
> http://www.dyer.vanderbilt.edu/server/apcupsd/ SUSPENDED

Hmm, perhaps you (or the list members in general) can help me with a
problem I'm just now encountering. We have a new dual PII 450 MHz with
512M SDRAM, an onboard AIC7895, a 9 GB Barracuda, a 6 GB IDE, and a HP
IDE-ATAPI CD (re)Writer. Although the linux kernel has support for
several IDE-ATAPI devices including the tape under discussion, so far I
see no mention of IDE CD writers.

I had expected that it would behave like a passive CD-ROM drive
when/until I work out some way to use it. Indeed it does -- to a point.
However, after a long read or large block copy from the CD, it appears
to hang the interface. Any disk operations that requires a stat of the
CD or its co-directories in the root filesystem hang, although the
system itself stays "up" for a while. Perhaps most surprising of all,
after hanging for a while (or while "thinking" for a while) the system
then spontaneously reboots! This is most unusual to my experience --
I've had a zillion system hangs where the system stops cold, but almost
NO hangs where the system reboots itself with no warning and no message
in many years experience.

I'm not absolutely certain that all the problems with the system are
associated with this CD -- we also had problems with the 1.05 eepro100
driver and the eepro that appeared to go away when we popped in a
linksys tulip -- but I've now experienced hangs followed by
deterioration and a reboot three or four times when accessing the CD ROM
in a most prosaic manner. Questions:

Is anyone using an IDE-ATAPI CD writer in a linux system? Does anyone
know whether there is anything that would be "unsafe" about them if used
just as a CD drive? Is anyone planning to add IDE-CDR to the kernel?
Does anyone (on kernel or SMP lists) have experience with sudden reboots
and can they suggest a possible cause or fix? I don't think that this
is really an SMP vs UP issue (although I could be wrong) as I've had
trouble with both kernel flavors -- I rather think that it might be a
speed/latency problem (as CPU's get faster, deep errors tend to surface)
or one of those problems that seem to hit particular hardware
combinations for no really good reason...

Thanks,

rgb

Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@phy.duke.edu




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