Updating the Update to the Update

I now recall that I actually worked out that point about the screaming interrupt possibly being fixed in more recent kernels some months ago, when the spluttage originally recommenced. (This was after rebuilding the system following the previous spluttage.)

However, when I upgraded to the latest-and-greatest-at-that-time kernel, it renamed my block devices.* My old kernel treated SATA devices like IDE devices, so they were named /dev/hdX, where X was some appropriate letter. However, since SATA only has one drive per channel, it actually skipped every second letter. Given the two channels of IDE on the motherboard† taking up hda through hdd, my SATA devices were hde, hdg, hdh and hdk. And then the drives on my PCI IDE controller were hdm through hdp.

Um, yeah.

Anyway, when I updated the kernel, it turned out that in th -

[Excuse me, something bad just happened. I was running badblocks again and it froze, apparently taking the disk offline. Doesn't seem inclined to bring it back, either. Unlike the old kernel, though, the system went neither clunk nor splut, which is at least some improvement.]

- in the process of patching this problem, they had changed things so that SATA drives were now pretend SCSI drives instead of being pretend IDE drives, and were now assigned device names starting with /dev/sda. Of course, my RAID arrays were built using the old device names, and so it, well, I believe the term is failed to proceed.‡

So I went back to the old kernel.

The very latest kernel, as it happens, takes care of all that, automagically fixing my RAID settings and bringing up the appropriate filesystems. Still borked, unfortunately.

[badblocks actually just reported in after a long nap, and then rolled over and went back to sleep.]

However, upon testing things with badblocks, or ϖ∂ as I like to call it, it seems that things are not much improved in terms of actually working. In terms of not bringing the entire system down, though, 2.6.10 scores major points.

So a win, more or less. Some more fiddling around for Pixy, and I'm probably still in the market for a good, cheap, four-port SATA controller. And don't mention the name "Highpoint", or I might be forced to bite you.

[Oh look, Lina just fell over. How about that. The one box that hasn't been giving me fits, and the place were all the munu backups are kept. Splut.]

* Equivalent to drive letters on Windows, except that on Linux you don't normally see them.
† Actually four, but I was only using two because the kernel I originally used didn't support the chipset for the other two.
‡ Some details of this might be wrong; I am going from memory here, and that is only slightly more reliable than my computers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:58 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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