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Re: FS Corruption



On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, Hamish Moffatt wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 11:13:16PM -0700, tony mancill wrote:
> > I'm having the same problem, did some research, and there seems to be a
> > problem with DMA for the VIA chipset.  This jives well with the fact that
> 
> Do you mean UltraDMA 33 (or 66)? I have one drive here which has that
> and I haven't seen a problem with 2.2.10ac12, although since the UDMA
> drive does not contain any linux partitions (only Windows) I might not
> have noticed.

UDMA 33.  I've been hacking on it all night, and have found out that I can
kill the filesystem everytime I use hdparm to turn DMA on, and cannot kill
it if DMA is off.  (I've been copying a slink source CD onto the drive and
the doing "find . -exec cksum {} \;" on the contents.  :)  If DMA is on,
nasty things start popping up in syslog almost immediately.  Even when
just reading from the fs (well, that involves modifying the atimes in the
inodes), I experience data loss. 

I feel certain that it's related to the warning in the 2.2.x kernel
sources about the VIA chipset.  I haven't had a chance to reboot with the
experimental support for the VIA, but that's next.  The danger is that by
default, the 2.2.x kernels will enable DMA for the IDE controller (the
VIA_VP included), and corruption can happen quickly.  I've been mondo
lucky, because there must be something wrong with the drive I've been
using for the past year (it may be jumpered incorrectly).  It supports
UDMA, but DMA requests to it time out immediately, so the kernel turns off
DMA in the driver for it.  The problem occurred for real when I added a
new drive...

You probably wouldn't have Windows problems since most motherboard
manufacturers include drivers for there IDE controller which fix crap like
this.  I checked the Soyo page, and they have one, even for my sorry
motherboard.

Anyway, sorry for the off-topic mail.  Send me mail directly if you want
any details about the problem.

  tony@mancill.com         |  Boy afraid... prudence never pays.
http://www.debian.org      |  And everything she wants costs money. (The Smiths)


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