Re: firewire 800 trouble

> The sbp2 suport under Linux 2.4 is not so bad. In fact, it works
> extremely well for me. Linux 2.4 and 2.6 even handle one of my older
> harddisk enclosures considerably more robustly than current iterations
> of OS X.

I have the exact opposite experience: I have two separate external
drive cases that do not work on 2.6 at all, ever. (One based on, of
course, the infamous PL-3507 chipset, and one an external DVD burner
that I can't remember the chipset on right now.) The DVD burner never
worked (and never even tried to mount) on 2.4, but the PL-3507 drive
worked for a month until we upgraded the kernel and then stopped
working.

On Mac OS X, they both operate flawlessly, in admittedly limited and/or
automated but still lengthy testing. (Tests like copying and deleting
100 gigs of data in a loop, left running over a weekend, for the hard
drive. For the DVD-RW, I use it for my personal machine backups.)

(Incidentally, I applied the latest flash ROM patch for the PL-3507
drive, and now it never even *starts* to work with Linux 2.4 or 2.6.)

> Furthermore, the number of kernel panics or similar drastic
> failures on my machines under my usage patterns is like this:
>
> Linux 2.4 < OS X < Linux 2.6
>
> This is not so bad, isn't it?

If that were my experience, I would be delighted. However, aside from
a series of awful kernel panics on one xServe, which turned out to be
the result of a bad piece of RAM, I've never had a kernel panic on one
of my xServes. On my Mac laptop, I have had three kernel panics in the
last six months. It is possible that one or more of those were
involved with firewire, but there was no obvious connection: I wasn't
burning a disk or using an external drive or anything during, and the
logs didn't show anything interesting on the firewire front. (One of
them had something to do with plugging in an external monitor, and I
couldn't come to any firm conclusions about either of the other two.

With Linux? Even with our 911 cases, we got them twice in the first
month on our 2.6 kernel setup, *after* I finally got them working in
the first place; that was four or five months ago, I don't even
remember what kernel. Maybe it was one of the bad ones...

> But sbp2 under Linux 2.6 has had its ups and downs --- especially
> downs.

And this is the real problem. I don't want to be put into a situation
where I have to choose between staying current with patches and keeping
my machine actually working with firewire. This is a publicly
available machine that I'm doing this on, and it needs to stay current
with all security updates or someone is going to eat it for lunch.

I am the only IT guy in a company of 40 people. I don't have time to
baby the servers, and selectively update my machines based on mailing
list feedback about what kernel not to use, what works okay, etc. When
the kernel 2.6 Redhat server software comes out, we'll probably be
using it on our machines, and upgrading whenever an update comes out.

I'm probably ranting, and I'll stop. I'm not trying to point fingers.
And I actually really *like* the xServes, and Mac OS X Server is quite
nice, so it's not exactly like I should be complaining about them. But
the extra $3000 we had to spend on the xServe and accessories, after
we'd already kitted out the Dell machine... that I don't like.

--Adam Lang

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Received on Fri Dec 3 21:09:11 2004