You're not likely to like this: I helped a friend set up a server with a sw RAID5 on four identical new Seagate IDE drives on two promise PCI adapters. Testing it with Bonnie++, the server could crash, freeze, corrupt and everything bad. I refused to accept a sw problem (this is SUSE after all) so we spent 1.5 months trying different motherboards, controllers, etc. After a while we found more and more reports about known issues with Linux and Promise. In the end (after three months of non-stop work) we found SUSE 9.1 to run flawlessly on the same configuartion where 9.0 and 9.2 would crash (I can't remember if we tested 9.3). Needless to say I was embassed having pushed for a SUSE based solution. This was a 32-bit system which is why I didn't mention it before. AFAICT, this problem is known but still hasn't been fixed. No, I couldn't believe it either. See for example http://kerneltrap.org/node/3040 (Too bad I can't relocated some juicy Alan Cox quotes on the matter). Tommy Marcin Zalewski wrote:
Hello,
I am trying to install SUSE 9.3 on Asus SK8N motherboard running Opteron. I use the built-in Promise SATA controller with two disks in IDE mode.
I was able to perfectly run SuSE 9.1 on this system for a long, long time. Now, with SuSE 9.3 I am not even able to get through the installation. It seems that the disk access causes the installation to hang sooner or later. When files are being copied the installation just freezes.
It seems that this problem is not specific to SUSE. Any other distro with 2.6 kernel that I tried freezes in the same way as SUSE.
Does anyone have a success story installing SUSE 9.3 on a similar setup? And also, is there some way that I can save kernel messages during installation?
Thanks,
Marcin Zalewski