From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1a) Gecko/20020702 Description of problem: It seems that HPT370A on Adaptec AHA 1200A causes both rh7.3 vanilla and upgraded kernel-2.4.18-10 to deadlock under heavy disk IO. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Do nothing. Deadlock in 1 to 16 days. 2.rpm --rebuild kernel-2.4.18-10.src.rpm in a loop. Deadlock in 1 to 2 days 3. Actual Results: Deadlock. No OOPS or anything enlightning in any logs, different count of disk-leds constantly on. Expected Results: Normal operation. Additional info: Every piece of HW changed, exept the harddisks, but three. (PSU, NICs, SDRAMs, UDMA cables, Motherboard & CPU and latest AHA1200A changed from revision A to revision B). Original HW configuration: intel celeron 800MHz abit sa6r htp370 on-board adaptec 1200a rev a (had it's own irq) 4 x 20GB ibm disks at-2500tx nic (rtl8138c) HW configuration now: intel celeron 1.2GHz asus tusl2-c adaptec 1200a rev b (shares irq with promise card) promise ultra133 tx2 3 x 20GB ibm disks 1 x 60GB ibm disk (replaced one 20GB disk because of smartctl reported 163 reallocated sectors) 2 x at2500-tx (rtl8139c) I did order a new promise card to replace adaptec alltogether, but since it's delivery date might be even 3 weeks from now I compiled 2.4.20-pre9 kernel for the beast and I'm now running rpm --rebuild kernel-2.4.18-10 in a loop again.
Should have been under reproduce 2.: 1 hour - 2 days. Not 1 - 2 days. So far it seems that 2.4.20-pre9 solves this problem I have been hunting very soon for four months. After installing 2.4.20-pre9 the beast has survived 7 rpm--rebuild kernel-2.4.18-10 and five consecutive full backups. ( Deadlock soon after backup was the original problem ... which I successfully had forgotten trying to find some HW fault instead of self upgrading kernel. Well, now I have extraneous HW to build more servers :) ) Still running tests, but with kernel-2.4.18-10 the system should have deadlocked several times already. Well, sometimes you just climb up the tree the wrong way.
The machine has now completed both various full-backups and rebuilds of kernel with 2.4.20-pre9. Thus I think I found the reason at last, unless the following week(s) let me know otherwise. So far I think this long lasting problem is finally solved.