[Asterisk-Users] RAID/SCSI/IDE/SATA and a TE405P (or T100P) card. Should I expect problems?

[Peter Svensson]

On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Deon Rodden wrote:

> However, reading all these posts about hardware incompatibiliites and little
> issues with different hardware has gotten me a little concerned about this
> migration/changeover. IRQ's, poor quality controllers, dual processor's,
> raid vs ide, etc. etc. can all affect a call. If the server isn't just
> right, I could encounter issues.

I personally think most of these issues are red herrings. Most interrupts 
should not be held long enough to interfere with the tdm interrupts, 
possibly with the exception of video interrupts routines. There should not 
even be a problem with shared interrupts.

One thing that could make a lot of difference is the pci bus latency
settings. Since this depends on all the other elements on the pci bus as
well this may cause things to miss their deadlines. Since the TE405
(unlike the older T1/E1 adapters) is bus mastering this can be an issue.  
Of course, if there is sufficient buffering on chip this point is moot.  
Some bioses get the caluclations wrong, or at least used to. This made
some cards miss their deadlines.

Does anyone know if this could be the source of some of the problems
people are experiencing?

As a reference we have missed the deadline on 824 out of 3034245416 
interrupts on our machine (2 E1 circuits, Fujitsu 1U server, one ide disk) 
even though we have hit the disks pretty hard from time to time. 

Peter