Re: Poor SATA performance on RHEL 4 and Intel

Thanks for your comments.

According to RedHat (release notes for various editions of RHEL3 and
RHEL4), SATA is supported. Note that I'm not using the onboard SATA
controller, but rather the separate Intel SRCS16 raid card, which is
also supported by RedHat (using the megaraid drivers).
I had seen much of the information concerning other SATA issues, but
most of them seemed centered around onboard controllers and some lack
of support (as you indicated) in the kernel.

Thanks again....
-Shelby

grodenhiATgmailDOTcom wrote:
I could be very wrong here put it is my understanding the official
linux kernel does not support SATA drives yet. There is a work around
by editting the libata.h file and recompiling the kernel (google libata
and linux kernel, you'll see a lot).


shel wrote:
We have reviewed all the documentation and made a couple of changes
based upon it without any positive affects.
We haven't tried the Intel driver yet because the documentation seemed
to indicate that the RedHat driver was more appropriate; the Intel doc
didn't reference a RHEL4 installation procedure and the RedHat doc
indicated the megaraid drivers had been updated in the edition we are
using.
Our next steps would likely be to try the driver or rebuild the OS (or
both).

Thanks,
Shelby

ken wrote:
shelby.crain@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
We are experiencing poor SATA performance (hdparm -t results of
1MB/sec) on our new RedHat Linux AS 4 server. The server is an Intel
SE7520BD2-based system with an Intel SRCS16 RAID card and 6 Hitachi
80GB drives. The system has 2 3.2 GHz Xeon CPUs (HyperThreaded). BIOS
has been updated on the SRCS16 and the motherboard. System experiences
momentary 'stoppage' when large disk accesses occur (all processing
seems to stop for 10 seconds or more at a time until the disk access is
completed). System load average is high during all periods of disk
usage.
RHEL 4 was installed with the megaraid-mbox drivers that come with RHEL
4 AS (per the RedHat documentation, this seems to be the correct
selection of drivers to use).
3 volumes have been created (2 RAID0 each on a separate drive for OS,
swap, and apps; 1 RAID5 for data).

Any comments or notes to help me find a solution would be appreciated.

-Shelby


Have you tried the Intel driver?

http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df-external/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=N&Inst=Yes&ProductID=1657&DwnldID=8400&strOSs=129&OSFullName=Red%20Hat*%20Enterprise%20Linux%204.0&lang=eng

Or gone through the White paper (Though there isn't much there that is
unusual.)

ftp://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/srcs16/sb/srcs16_performancetuning_white_paper_v10.pdf

Ken

.

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