[Discuss] Firewire 800 controller and sbp2

[taras]

pw wrote:
> taras wrote:
>>
> /chop
>> I ran into the problems that you described
>> with just one drive. Basically after a while of io activity the fw 
>> system screws itself up and firewire no longer works.
>> Same setup works fine if a recent 2.4 kernel is used.
> /chop
>>
>> Taras
>
> How much activity were you getting before your firewire bombed?
> How long did your system go before the poo hit the turbine?
Was bittormenting for ~8hours which caused constant firewire traffic and 
I assume triggered some sort of a race condition.
>
> The reason I ask is, these drives have been pretty reliable for
> the past 3 years. They ran fine with mandriva 2006 for a full year
> with a 2.6 kernel.
>
> Problems seem to arise with firewire when things like powerdowns
> happen without modprobe -r sbp2 first. For some reason when
> drives are on system as partition devices, even if the drives
> are not mounted, if the system powers down the file system
> on the drive gets broken. Then running fsck after reboot does
> the rest of the job.
Don't know why anyone in 2006 still uses fsck.
>
> With proper shutdown script and UPS daemon that's not a real
> problem for power fails etc..
This is a problem if too much IO kills your driver, you have to admit.
>
> The current problems came to the fore after a power failure,
> a UPS, and a bad battery combined to shutdown the computer
> before shutdown scripts got to run.
>
> The biggest problem with firewire 800 is the flimsy cable connection.
> Some committee, somewhere, really missed when they agreed to that
> design.
Good luck with this, I'd still log a bug report. I have long since 
gotten rid of all of my firewire stuff in favour of usb2. It's slower, 
but usb2 in linux is finally reliable.

Taras