# [closed] SATA hard drives will not start under Xen

## grooveman

Hello.

I am having a peculiar problem with Xen.  I am running a dual amd64 system on a Tyan Tomcat h1000s

S3950 motherboard with 4 Gigs of ram and two SATA 3.0 g/s seagate drives (in RAID 1

configuration using LVM2).  I am using Gentoo Linux, current as of today.

When I boot the system, everything looks good until it starts the drives, then the system

chokes and spits out a bunch of errors like these:

--------------------

ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:01:0e.0[A] -> GSI 11 (level, low) -> IRQ 11

ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xffffc2000002c000 ctl 0xffffc2000002c020 bmdma

0xffffc2000002c031

ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xffffc2000002c100 ctl 0xffffc2000002c120 bmdma

0xffffc2000002c131

ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xffffc2000002c200 ctl 0xffffc2000002c220 bmdma

0xffffc2000002c231

ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xffffc2000002c300 ctl 0xffffc2000002c320 bmdma

0xffffc2000002c331

scsi0: sata_svw

ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)

ata1.00: ATA-7: ST3250410AS, 3.AAC, max UDMA/133

ata1.00: 488397168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)

ata1.00: qc timeout (cmd0xef)

ata1.00: failed to set xfermode (err_mask=0x4)

ata1: failed to recover some devices retrying in 5 secs

(starts over with SATA link up 1.5 gbps...)

------------------------------------------

Eventually the system gives up (after struggling for like 10 minutes) and locks up hard.

I found that if I disabled APIC in the BIOS, it will boot -- but as soon as I try to

start the network, the logs fill with more of the same junk, and the system locks up hard.

I installed a gentoo-sources kernel, and used the exact same config file -- the system

boots just fine.  No problems whatsoever.  So, this is definitely a Xen thing...

This is all reminiscent of an IRQ conflict to me, or maybe it is  problem between xen and the broadcom Servworks chipset... not sure.  My hope is that there is a simple fix Ijust don't know about...

Anything I can do to fix this?

btw: using kernel version 2.6.21-xen -- the most recent kernel in portage -- and xen 3.4.0

Thanks for any help.

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## VinzC

Tried downgrading xen? Just in case...

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## grooveman

You mean to < 3.4.0?  or you mean an earlier kernel version?

The problem with the kernel is that the latest in portage is 2.6.21 -- you already are chastised by the system for being out of date whenever it boots.  It says something like "Udev only works in 2.6.22 or higher...", so I think that this branch of the portage tree is in real need of an update.

I did try an overlay of 2.6.30 from here:  http://code.google.com/p/gentoo-xen-kernel/downloads/list , but that didn't work either.  I couldn't even get that one to boot properly... would go to a blank screen and reboot.

I got xen running on another box just fine... but it just doesn't seem to like this one.

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## VinzC

That's the reason for a downgrade, I would say. So, yes, downgrade to <xen-3.4 as I expect the latter branch to rely upon most recent features that your current kernel can't provide, I'm afraid.

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## grooveman

Well, a good a thought as any, Vinz... but I get the same results...  :Sad: 

My faith in Xen is waning, I'm afraid.

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## VinzC

In a desperate strike of hope, I would install/try a distribution that includes xen and see if it works. Start with Debian for instance. I know there are guides all over the place.

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## grooveman

Well... it seems to work just dandy under Debian.  Go figure.  Maybe Gentoo and Xen are not such a good combination. It seems pretty clear it isn't a priority with the developers (being that it is still masked and the most recent kernel version is years old).  That is unfortunate for me, but I understand.  I'm sure the Gentoo team has only so many resources/man hours to dedicate to projects.  Something has to give, and it must be Xen.  Maybe they figure everyone should be using linux KVM... But that still doesn't have some of the nice features that Xen does.

I appreciate your time, Vinz.

G

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## VinzC

Fact is RedHat now supports and advertises KVM although it was Xen in the first place. It's unfortunate that Xen doesn't work under Gentoo like it does under Debian but maybe Debian developers have provided fixes for that version. There must be a way to port changes across distributions.

EDIT: Wait! Debian is just another distro, right? What would prevent you from using the same kernel branch as Debian? Surely you would need to recompile glibc against Debian Linux headers but I'm sure it can be done.

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