[from a few days ago]
Chris Smith wrote:
I am a n00b.
you missed:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq2.html#Bugs
...
The system still chokes with a DMA timeout after ~30mins of
heavy stuff (I was compiling /usr/ports/x11/gnome as something I knew
would take forever).
Is this a self-inflicted wound?:
possibly, though sounds like a bug. However, lack of dmesg and precise
messages/symptoms leaves doubt.
OpenBSD is the only partition on wd0, and I hurried through the
partitioning, basically chunking the disk evenly across /,
/usr, /var, and /usr/x11 per the installation pamphlet.
"If I got the disk, I got to allocate it". Don't do that. Allocate
what you need, and save the rest for later. Otherwise, you will spend
lots of time watching your 99.9% empty partition fsck.
Do you have ANY IDEA how big 300G is?
Can you imagine how much paper tape it would take to back it up??
(years ago, when I first started working in the computer industry, a
friend and I were drooling over the potential of a hard disk...and we
asked that question. The "endless" hard disk in question? 10M. Hint:
10 bytes per inch on paper tape).
Questions:
a) Could naive partitioning on a fat IDE drive put enough latency into
the system that a DMA timeout will inevitably happen?
no.
Not even sure what you are saying, but no.
I have 500M partitions on 1T drives in production (three 500G drives in
an Accusys RAID5 box). Works great.
b) Should I punt and beg my wife for enough cash to replace the motherboard?
possibly. Or a $30 add-on card that works better. Or $5 for a better
cable. :)
c) Given C/H/S values of 36481, 255, and 63 what would be a reasonable
partition scheme for a "home server" box? (Failing that, pointers
to previous discussion would be great).
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Partitioning
However, your partitioning can be a problem without it being the problem
you are complaining about.
Nick.
