APIC on AMD Athlon 2500+ Broken?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 12:27:33PM -0400, Tim Writer wrote:
> It can be horrible too.  Many (most?) products are still not well supported
> by Linux meaning you have to boot into a crappy RAID BIOS to make changes.
> That's difficult to do when managing systems remotely.  And, of course, every
> product has a different interface making for a maintenance nightmare when you
> have to support many such systems in the field.

Well I know IBM's ServeRaid has decent control software for linux, and
3ware should to (like 90% of their cards are in linux systems they claim).

> In contrast, Linux software RAID works well and puts you in full control,
> even allowing you to do unusual things like mirroring to a network block
> device or a USB stick.  I don't really buy the performance argument because
> the vast majority of modern machines are I/O bound with plenty of cycles to
> spare for computing checksums, parity, etc.  Probably the most useful feature
> of (some) hardware RAID is a non-volatile cache but what does that really buy
> you over extra (inexpensive) RAM coupled with a decent UPS?

True it's hard to beat the flexibility and availability of stats
information and debuging info.

> Another reason why I use them as regular IDE controllers.
> 
> Yes, I've heard these are nice.

I have heard from one of their distributers that a lot of 3ware users
are using them simply as 12 channel SATA controllers with scsi
interface/performance.  Then they run linux software raid on top.  I
guess it does have some advantages, although booting is still simpler
from hardware managed raid, as is controlling rebuilds.

Lennart Sorensen
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