Re: kernel issues
On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 10:27:13AM -0500, Freels, James D. wrote:
> Thank you Fredrick, this is very helpful.
>
> My plan now is to stick with the 2.6.x series of kernels since the 2.4.x
> kernels will not be compatible with the Debian port.
>
> I also just tried your suggestion and cranked down the bandwidth on this
> card to 20 MB/s to be on the conservative side. But alas, the machine
> hang exactly the same way. Interestingly, when I set the rate in the
> bios at boot up to 40 MB/s, the bios then changed the rate to 20 MB/s on
> the actual device when doing the initialization of the devices. Since I
> only have two devices on the card (vax-2 packet loader, and the vxa-2
> tape drive, both Exabyte products) this is as simple a scsi chain as I
> can get. Then I changed the speed to 20 MB/s at the bios thinking I
> would match the card interpretation of the device speed. After that,
> the diagnostics changed the speed to 10 MB/s.
>
> I also wonder if an earlier kernel (say the 2.6.8 kernel that is in the
> Debian packaging) will run better.
>
> finally, what scsi card will work best with this arch ? I don't really
> care about the brand name, I just want one that works ! I had great
> success with the symbios cards on the alpha machines. Is there a
> preferred scsi card on the amd64 machines for Linux (Debian) ?
If you set the speed to 40MB/s on a wide card, and the device is narrow,
it would loose half the set speed due to the lack of half the bus width.
More correct would be to label it 20MHz, but they don't seem to do that
on some of the cards (probably since it confused some people if a 160
card didn't show 160 in the menu, but showed 80MHz).
Len Sorensen
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