I've been playing with this controller whole weekend, and just findout very unpleasent thing -) syncing md raid array on the Promise SATA150 TX4 controller with Seagate Barracuda SATA disks makes the system latently unmanagable. It does not matter what preemtion do you choose. It is syncing the array, you can switch the consoles, but that is all. You cannot even login, that gives you logon timout. Just you need to wait until the array is synced. This is for any usage unusable in favour of possible recovery of the array in future. Once the array is synced, it works smoothly. I have seen this on kernel versions: 2.6.16-vs2.1.1-rc17-gentoo 2.6.15-vs2.0.1-rc3-gentoo and on these mobos: Jetway V2MDMP Abit KX7-333 Asus A7V8X-X They are all with VIA chipset however I don't have any Intel board at the moment. I am not sure if it is bug or feature but is very, very strange. So I would like to please, if there is someone else who has this controller to test this behavior to confirm or disconfirm this. Thanks Stripe System uname: 2.6.15-vs2.0.1-r1-gentoo i686 AMD Athlon(tm) Processor Gentoo Base System version 1.6.14 distcc 2.18.3 i686-pc-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [enabled] dev-lang/python: 2.4.2 sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.12 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r7 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.22 virtual/os-headers: 2.6.11-r2 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-march=athlon -O2 -pipe -ftracer -fomit-frame-pointer -fstack-protector" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/share/config /var/bind /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/eselect/compiler /etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon -O2 -pipe -ftracer -fomit-frame-pointer -fstack-protector" DISTDIR="/usr/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig buildpkg ccache distcc distlocks noauto notitles sandbox sfperms strict usersandbox" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.suchdol.net ftp://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/gentoo ftp://ftp.sh.cvut.cz/MIRRORS/gentoo http://gentoo.oregonstate.edu http://gentoo.inode.at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo" LINGUAS="cs en" MAKEOPTS="-j3" PKGDIR="/usr/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" SYNC="rsync://gentoo.suchdol.net/gentoo-portage" USE="x86 3dnow acl apm berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 bzlib caps cli crypt curl dri eds emboss encode expat foomaticdb fortran ftp gd gdbm gif gstreamer hardened idn imlib isdnlog jpeg libg++ libwww lm_sensors mad mhash mikmod mime mmx motif mysql ncurses nls ogg pam pcre pdflib perl pie png pppd pwdb python readline reflection samba sdl session snmp spell spl sse ssl tcpd tiff truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev usb vorbis xml xml2 xorg zlib linguas_cs linguas_en userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, INSTALL_MASK, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, PORTDIR_OVERLAY my kernel config used you can find at http://mves.ssh.cz/.config
check /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max The _min and _max switches are managing the data rates, default is min=1000 max=200000 Reducing max to 5000 or so might fix it
ya, seems much friendly at lower rates... I'll try to set them to sysctl and test the whole behavior with lower system load... thanks for quick help stripe
