Linux Compatibility Tested - Adaptec AHA-294OUW

Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI adapter.
(rev .11)
AppLabs
September 9 1999 This document presents the results of the Linux Compatibility test, which included the installation and testing of Red Hat 6.0. with the Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI adapter.
AppLabs' Linux compatibility testing of these components showed the Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller card to be compatible with Caldera Red Hat 6.0. The Adaptec AHA-2940UW SCSI controller card is awarded the AppLabs Linux Compatibility mark.

CARD DETECTION PASS

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Card was inserted and the computer was booted to the RED HAT DC. The drive was partitioned using the fdisk utility that came with Red Hat. The install program formatted the drive and checked from bad blocks. A full installation of the Red Hat was completed.

DRIVER INSTALLATION PASS

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DRIVE PREP PASS

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FORMAT TEST PASS

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BOTTLENECK TEST PASS

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The bonnie harddrive testing utility was downloaded and uncompressed in the /tmp directory A test file of 600MB was used to avoid any harddrive cache that might skew the test results. According to the bonnie documentation a test file of at least twice the physical memory should be used. The Bonnie results were dumped to a file for later comparison.
ie ./bonnie -s 600 > /mnt/floppy/2940uwonecard.onedrive
The drive was capable of 20MB /sec external transfers but was only doing 5MB /sec . A check of the /var/log/demsg file confirmed that the drive was only loaded on boot in asynchronous mode. Operated in this mode the max possible speed is 5MB/sec according to the drive manufacturer.

MULTIPLE DEVICE TEST PASS

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The IBM 8GB drive was connected to the same card as the Seagate drive. Partitions sdb1,sdb2,sdb2,sdb5 were created using fdisk.Partition sdb1 was formatted and mounted under /mnt/sdb1. The bonnie program was copied there. Simultaneous copies of bonnie were run on the two drives from console 1 and 2. ie
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940uwonecard.sda1
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940uwonecard.sdb1

MULTIPLE CARD/DRIVES TEST PASS

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a second 2940UWcard was installed into the machine. and was connected to an 8GB drive. To simply testing the boot drive was attached to the card in the PCI socket with the lowest ID. The bonnie program was then run simultaneously on consoles 1 and 2 form both drives and the results were saved for later comparison. ie
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940uwtwocard.sda1
./bonnie -s 600 >/mnt/floppy/2940uwtwocard.sdb1

SOFTWARE RAID TEST PASS

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The mdutils.rpm was installed which added the mdtools - mdcreate, mdadd, mdrun, mdop. The kernel was recompiled to include the raid functions. When the functions were compiled as modules they would not run. When they were compiled directly into the kernel it worked fine. to simplify testing a linear array was setup. The /dev directory was checked to verify that the md devices existed, but they didn't. The multidisk devices were created, MAKEDEV md. The mdtab file was created using mdcreate.e.e...
i.e. mdcreate linear /dev/md0/dev/sda2/dev/sdb2

The multidevice was added to the device list using mdadd -a. It was then run to make it accessible using mdrun -a. Both functions could be accomplished using one command, dmadd -ar. The partition was then formatted for ext2, using mke2fs. Tester then mounted the device under /mnt/md0. From here the bonnie program was compiled to /mnt/md0. It was then run the same as in the other tests.
i.e. ./bonnie -s > mnt/floppy/2940uw/raid.

Hardware Used for Testing

Pentium II 400 Mhz . Two SCSI hard drives.

Setup

The installation cdrom was run off the internal IDE controller but no IDE harddrive was used. All software was run directly form the SCSI drives. Unless specifically noted, the test file written by the bonnie test program was 600 Mbytes. The large size was used to avoid any caching.

Additional notes are available describing testing procedures used with this SCSI controller card.