I've got a homebuilt server running gentoo. I just built a software (linux md) RAID5 array using four SATA drives (connected via a Promise PCI SATA card).
In addition to the RAID array, there's a SCSI drive from which the OS boots and runs; two PATA drives merged together under lvm2; and one PATA drive mounted "normally" (i.e. no lvm2/md/whatever). Last night, I was copying about 26GB from the standalone PATA drive to the RAID array. At the same time, I was ripping a DVD to the RAID drive via NFS (i.e. the rip occurred on a different computer, but the storage was the RAID array exported via nfs). Twice in a row, under these conditions, the server locked up. They were hard lockups---couldn't ping the machine and the keyboard was totally unresponsive. I checked the logs, and couldn't find ANYTHING to suggest the cause of the lockup (nothing at all out of the ordinary). After being discouraged by the two hard lockups, I performed one task at a time: first ripped the DVD, then copied files. No lockups. My questions are: (1) does anyone know what might have caused the lockups? I have a feeling I could duplicate this again without too much effort. Also, (2) is there any mechanism I can use to actually track down the root cause? Right now, there are too many variables: flaky hardware (although this machine has *never* locked up prior to adding the SATA card+drives), nfs daemon, libata code, sata controller driver, linux md code... Thanks in advance, Matt -- Matt Garman -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
