woody/linux 2.4/raid/athlon/almost a horror story
i had originally planned to delay testing of linux
2.4 until late this year. but i recently had an
urge to try to do some video capture, and discovered
if i want to capture at 640x480 i need linux 2.4
and V4L2. So since this is a fresh install i
decided to try out 2.4......
what a horrible experience.
firstly, i compiled my 2.4.5 kernel with "Athlon/Duron'
support, and was promptly greeted with "Illegal Instruction"
on e2fsck when i tried to boot the system. Kind of
odd considering i have an athlon 1309mhz proc ..
anyways i booted back to 2.2.19(good kernel..good
kernel..) and recompiled for PPRO instead of athlon.
this time it got farther, and begun to scan my
raid(!) arrays. since the arrays were stopped clean
i didn't understand why it was doing this. i have
/usr and /var on raid1 and i have /space on raid0.
it took the next hour and a half to scan(don't know
why it was only scanning at ~2MB/s while under
linux 2.2 it scans at ~15MB/s). when i came back
to the screen i saw tons of errors saying /dev/md0
md1 md2 no such device, can't scan the filesystems
and dumped me to a prompt. i rebooted the system
again into 2.2.19 again and everything was fine.
honestly i expected linux 2.4's "updated" raid
to have totally trashed my old raid drives(and no
i don't want to use the new raid, ive been using
the old raid for over 2 years without a single
problem...ever) but it booted fine, the arrays
were clean(although i think i should force
a check just to be sure) was able to login
to kdm and get my afterstep desktop, no glitches.
PHEW.
now can someone enlighten me as to what could
of gone wrong? i expected since i was running
woody a fairly smooth changeover to 2.4 with
the exception of having to recompile my other
modules like nvidia driver, vmware and bttv
i had no idea id encounter such issues before
even getting to a login prompt.
this of course leaves a horrible taste in my
mouth. im just glad 2.4 didn't trash my drives.
even if it did i'd only lost a week of data
luckily i decided to stop trusting the local
machine due to an asus motherboard frying my
filesystems a couple weeks ago(have since replaced
it) and now save most of my data directly to
NFS shares on my main server.
the installation of woody is about a week old...
ohwell....i guess this experience just makes me
more glad that linux 2.2 is solid.
my system:
woody(1 week old)
athlon 1300mhz
768mb sdram
tyan KT133A-based motherboard(forgot the part#)
dual IBM 20GB ide drives
promise ata100 controller(non raid)
adaptec aha2940UW scsi
4x8x CD-R (SCSI)
Nvidia Geforce2 MX 200 (64MB) AGP
Intel eepro100
Soundblaster PCI 128
Hauppauge WinTV Go!(bt848 i believe)
450watt PC Power & Cooling power supply
~650watt (1100VA) UPS
Linux 2.2.19(ide patch, nvidia kernel drivers,
bttv drivers)
nate
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