IDE problems

[Steven Timm]

> > We are currently running 2.2.19-6.2.1 kernel as it came from Red Hat.
>
>    There are some known problems with the ServerWorks LE chipset that
> cause filesystem corruption on some recent kernels.  The bottom line is
> that it appears to be a BIOS bug, and that disabling DMA on your IDE
> chains will prevent that.  A chain of BIOS updates may or may not solve
> your problem, but I haven't seen anything too encouraging yet.  A detailed
> bug report can be found at
>
> http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=38429
>
> Good luck.
> -jdm
>

The bug report in question is describing bugs in the 2.4 kernel.
Has anyone seen the problems like that in 2.2 kernels besides me?--
Also, turning DMA off is a non-starter for us...we depend on DMA I/O
for the application we are running.

The vendor has tried three types of hard disk on the nodes so far...
Maxtor, Seagate (which didn't show hda errors but did
show massive filesystem corruption as described in the bug report above)
and now Western Digital, where there are filesystem
errors that hang the machine but the system usually comes back fine
after reboot and fsck.
They are now trying to go to IBM drives (which are working fine
as data drives on these systems, albeit on the secondary IDE bus.)

Steve Timm