Re: 1394 IDE Drives on RHEL As 2.1

Jody McIntyre wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 07:42:25PM -0600, Alan Williams wrote:
>> What are your concerns with the 2.6.9 branch? I have access to a fedora core
>> 2 release that I could also try.
>
> 2.6.9 is missing several ieee1394 bugfixes, but unfortunately these are
> still "in limbo" waiting for 2.6.11 to be released. For best results with
> 2.6.x, run the latest -mm kernel, linux1394.org SVN on top of the latest
> Linus kernel, or my linux-1394 BK tree.

For some users, older and therefore buggier 2.6 kernels worked even
better WRT SBP-2 than some more recent 2.6 kernels. I do not remember
the particular status of 2.6.9 though. I am quite certain that the
configurations recommended by Jody are indeed preferable to 2.6.9. I
can't assess the impact of this on Oracle support though.

It should be possible to put the latest linux1394.org drivers into 2.6.9
too, however this would require to revert all patches that introduced
2.6.10/11-specific macros or subsystem calls.

> 2.6 in general is said to be less stable than 2.4 for ieee1394, but I
> don't run 2.4 so I can't comment.

 - less reliable WRT device detection and SBP-2 logins
 - less stable WRT async transactions as used by sbp2 and eth1394
   (but considerably more compliant and more stable at the "application"
   level of eth1394)
 - less reliable WRT kernel module unloading
 - 2.6 is supposed to support hot(un)plugging of SCSI devices, but in
   reality, the available hacks for kernel 2.4 (rescan script or kernel
   patch) usually work just as well or as badly

The severity of the 2.6 issues depend more or less on the particular 2.6
subreleases and vary *much* between HW/SW setups. Alan, if you think a
FC2-like setup might bring you advantages over a 2.4 based setup (better
BIO? better process and thread scheduling? newer software packages?) and
if you can spare the time and machine for tests, just give it a try to
see how well SBP-2 works for you.

Disclaimer: I did not test the most recent (promising) incarnations of
the 1394 drivers for kernel 2.6 yet.

-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-=-=-= --=- =-==-
http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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