OpenSUSE Linux Rants

I wanted to thank everyone who has provided great feedback on the ebook that I released last Monday. As many of you know, the influx of HTTP requests took my server to its knees. This happened because my server has limited bandwidth. It could not fill all the requests fast enough, so everything bogged. When I limited the number of connections, everything normalized again. It’s all good, though. It’s good to know that there is that much interest. Hopefully, the ebook is helpful to everyone who wants to learn about how to use Linux.

I have been a bit silent since the release of the ebook. This is mainly because I am focusing on a problem I’m having with a server at work. It has an old Adaptec 2100S RAID controller. This is driven by either the i2o_block module or the dpt_i2o module. Evidently, in SUSE 10.0 (which is what I tried first), both modules load, causing a race condition. In 10.1, the i2o_block module is used. The problem is that when I use this module, the server randomly locks up. I did manage to grab this error during one of those lockups:

kernel BUG at include/linux/i2o.h:1074!
invalid opcode: 0000 [#1]
SMP
last sysfs file: /firmware/edd/int13_dev81/extensions
Modules linked in: ipv6 af_packet edd reiserfs loop dm_mod usbhid ide_cd cdrom i2c_piix4 i2c_core e1000 mii sworks_agp agpgart shpchp pci_hotplug ohci_hcd usbcore parport ext3 jbd processor i2o_block i2o_core serverworks ide_disk ide_core
CPU:	0
EIP:	0060:[]	Not tainted VLI
EFLAGS: 00210282	(2.6.16.13-4-smp #1)
EIP is at i2o_driver_dispatch+0x25/0x1a1 [i2o_core]
eax: 01ba0000 ebx: fffffffe ecx: dfcfec00 edx: 01b90000
esi: dfcfec00 edi: fffffffe ebp: 0000000b esp: c034bf38
ds: 007b es: 007b ss: 0068
Process swapper (pid: 0, threadinfo=c034a000 task=c02ef2c0)
Stack: <0>dfcfec00 00000068 c01277b2 fffffffe dfcfec00 000000b f884d62c
	c1b78840 00000000 c013ff8a c034bfa4 00000580 c0341380 0000000b c1b78840

Call Trace:
 [] do_timer+0x39/0x316
 [] i2o_pci_interrupt+0x22/0x3e [i2o_core]
 [] handle_IRQ_event+0x23/0x4c
 [] __do_IRQ+0x7e/0xd1
 [] do_IRQ+0x46/0x53
 [] common_interrupt+0x1a/0x20
 [] default_idle+0x0/0x55
 [] default_idle+0x2c/0x55
 [] cpu_idle+0x8e/0xa7
 [] start_kernel+0x2b5/0x2bb
Code: 20 75 de 5b 5e c3 55 57 89 d7 56 53 83 ec 0c 89 04 24 8b 90 a4 00 00 00 39 d7 72 0f j8b 0c 24 89 d0 03 81 a8 00 00 00 39 c7 72 08 <0f> 0b 32 04 45 ed 84 f8 8b 04 24 89 fe 29 d6 03 b0 a0 00 00 00
<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt

What is funny is that the Kubuntu CD I booted into uses the dpt_i2o module rather than the i2o_block module. Because of this, what I decided to do was to force it to use the dpt_i2o module. Hopefully it won’t lock up as it’s compiling that kernel or making and installing the modules. If anyone has any other ideas on how to address this issue, I’m all ears.