Bug#524876: sata_mv: frozen/hard reset on 4-port 5041 chip

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Hi,

David Alitz wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 4:44 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

>> Thanks for reporting it, and sorry for the slow response.  Basic
>> questions:
>>
>>  - Does downgrading the kernel again to the version from etch help?
>>    It should be possible to test this by testing in the installer
>>    environments for etch and lenny separately, for example.
>>
>>  - Do more current kernels behave better?  (I doubt they would, but
>>    it's always worth a try.)
>>
>>  - Could you attach full dmesg output from bootup of the last working
>>    and first non-working kernel you have tried?  http://snapshot.debian.org/
>>    has many kernels if you'd like to narrow the regression range.
>>
>>  - Any other weird symptoms?  Do you have any ideas about what could
>>    be causing this?
[...]
> Problem solved... sorry I didn't report back to the bug.
>
> It turned out to be hardware.  The drives in the server were standard
> Western Digital drives instead of their RAID drives.  Apparently the older
> driver was slow enough that the drive latency didn't cause problems.
> Replacing the drives with RE3 drives fixed everything.

Thanks for the update.  Forwarding to the other submitter and the bug
log.

Such questions as the hardware requirements for RAID are beyond my
depth, so hopefully someone else can say whether this behavior is as
designed (my suspicion is "no") and whether it is important enough to
fix in a stable update or just in a later release (my suspicion is
"later release").