Dear sirs,
I recently had to install Mandrake 7.0R2 on a file server including
a Tekram 395UW SCSI host adapter.
I first thought I was lucky since 7.0 included a driver (dc395x_trm)
for the board. Unfortunately, the server quickly displayed numerous
warning messages ("arbitration lost but reselection wins" and so on)
and finally complained about file systems errors.
Once I was sure the UW disks attached to the Tekram were not at
fault, I investigated the dc395 driver. I finally made my way to
the homepage of it's author, Kurt Garloff:
http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/dc395/
I found out the current version was 1.26 (now it is 1.27) while the
version included in Mandrake 7.0R2 was 1.10. Which is very unfortunate
as the revisions 1.23 to 1.26 provide essential workarounds for the
bugs of this SCSI chip (which occur mainly on loaded SCSI bus, it
seems).
The latest revision of this driver compiles out of the box on a
Mandrake 7.0R2 system, and I am convinced now that all my data loss
problems are solved (I did a lot of file copying and removing through
the SCSI chain, which was impossible with the 1.10 driver, even with
downgraded SCSI bus speeds).
Speaking about bus speed, the documentation of this driver states
clearly that due to the numerous bugs of the chip, 20 MHz (aka
20 Mb/s narrow, 40 Mb/s wide) is less than stable and it is safier
to downgrade to 10 MHz (hit F2 or F6 at boot time for Tekram BIOS
settings).
So:
1/ if you have such a controller, please upgrade the driver with the
one found abive, or you'll hit BIG problems quickly, and keep away
from the fastest bus speed,
2/ if you're a Mandrake developper, please pay attention to upgrade
the driver you'll include in Mandrake 7.1.
Well, that's a very humble contribution that I'm happy to make to
Mandrake Linux, the best distribution so far in my opinion!
Kind regards,
Yann
--
Yann-Erick Proy -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Quartz Informatique -- http://www.quartz.fr/ -- Annecy (F-74000)
La diversité est source de richesse.
