3ware 7506, FreeBSD 4.x, Maxtor Disks & SMART Problems.

Carroll Kong me at carrollkong.com
Thu Sep 9 15:04:45 PDT 2004


<sniffles>  Well, I tried your command first to see if we could get a quick
"test".  It ran for about 30 mins, I re-ran it on another partition, and I
even ran another instance of it on yet another partition.  It kept going.

Then we ran some very file intensive (updates hundreds of files in a lot of
different directories) and it seemed to stall my writes to the /var
partition, which in turn broke one of my instances of dnscache, which then
snowballed until doing tail /var/log/messages would hang the zsh completely.

I am thinking it "might" be because we have not done array integrity checks
yet because our firmware is so old and the old 3dm does not support it.

Throughout the entire time, smartd was runing and reported two more errors
on one of the disks, but nothing major.  I am not 100% sure if there was as
correlation between those errors and the ultimate meltdown

I retested this again, I was able to get it to hang again.  I am beginning
to wonder if the other things I use could play a role in this.

- using vnode backed disks/partitions
- using jails
- using a pci riser card (my 7450 is 64bit/33mhz, the problem does not apply
to me)
however, there is a slight chance that maybe my riser card isn't seated as
well?  Really trying to grasp at straws here.

I tried truss on the "file intense" activity, all it showed was after a
certain time it hung at a stat call.  Basically all I/O just halted
magically.

SmartD did not show any error increases when the problem occurred.  Maybe
it's not my maxtors then.



- Carroll Kong
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Thomson" <jason.thomson at mintel.com>
To: "Carroll Kong" <me at carrollkong.com>
Cc: <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 09, 2004 6:12 AM
Subject: Re: 3ware 7506, FreeBSD 4.x, Maxtor Disks & SMART Problems.


> Hi Carroll,
>
> I posted the original problem report you referred to earlier.
>
> 3ware are looking into the problem.  It looks like it's a problem with
> 3ware's firmware (perhaps related to some anomaly in the way that Maxtor
> disks behave).
>
> It would appear that it's only a problem when the disk has errors.
>
> On one machine,  I can reproduce this problem by dd'ing from the RAID5
> array:
>
> dd if=/dev/twed0s1h iseek=137510 bs=1m of=/dev/null
>
> On that machine I have the lockup will *always* be preceded by the
> following message on the console:
>
> twe0: AEN: <twe0: port 3: sector repair occurred>
>
> Do you have any error messages on the console?
>
>
> I think that the disk I have on port 3 is flakey.  I could replace the
> disk,  but I'm waiting until 3ware get back to me / issue a fix so I can
> have some reasonable idea that the problem is fixed.
>
> 3ware *have* been looking into this problem,  and I think have
> established that it's a firmware rather than a driver issue (it occurs
> with other OSes as well apparently).  I don't know how close they are to
> being able to fix this.
>
> We buy all our new machines with Western Digital disks (and 3ware
> controllers).  No problems yet (and we have about 10 of them - more than
> we have with Maxtor disks).
>
> (BTW I have established over a period of months that this problems
> existed with various versions of the driver and firmware dating back to
> 2003.  It still exists with the latest FBSD driver and 3ware firmware:
> FE7X 1.05.00.068)
>
> Carroll Kong wrote:
> > I tried using the SmartD 5.33 (CVS).  It appeared to work, but did not
pick
> > up anything in the next crash.  I noticed some temperature changes, and
I
> > plan on running some difference tests, but nothing out of the ordinary.
> >
> > This time the crash hung a lot of httpds and got them stuck into the D
> > state.  We had something like this happen before ... but now that I
think
> > about it, it matches the experience of Jason almost perfectly.
> >
> > Upon lockup, sometimes we still have partial control of the system.  The
> > processes waiting on the 3ware card cannot be killed.  The web sites
that
> > are still in cache are servable.
> >
> > It occurred when a big I/O request was going through (along with the
normal
> > web traffic).  The odd thing is, it's not a function of raw I/O, since
our
> > definition of big I/O was simply 3-4MB/sec according to iostat.  It
seems
> > over time it just... well it just goes kaput if you push it a bit hard
after
> > a long days run of non-stop I/Os.
> >
> > The initial fsck we do runs at 17MB/sec at far more transactions per
second.
> > Anyway, I am convinced the problem is somehow related to the 3ware
system
> > (either the disks, the controller or something).  Originally I was
looking
> > at other possibilities, but seeing people's experiences here, and a
> > colleague of mine's experience, something fishy is going on.
> >
> > I am leaning towards a full hdd swap, seems like I will have to replace
one
> > disk at a time and let it rebuild slowly to eventually swap out all the
> > disks.  I am able to get this problem to occur faster and faster now,
> > unfortunately it is a production box and we would much rather it not.
And I
> > am going to switch off to Seagate instead of Maxtor.  Despite using
> > 3ware+maxtor on other machines here, (but they have considerably less
load),
> > it's just too much of a coincidence that 3 different people including
myself
> > have had problems with 3ware+maxtor whereas you can easily find that
many
> > and more that have it working fine with another vendor.
> >
> >
> >
> > - Carroll Kong
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Carroll Kong" <me at carrollkong.com>
> > To: "Jason Thomson" <jason.thomson at mintel.com>; <so14k at so14k.com>
> > Cc: <vkayshap at amcc.com>; <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 3:24 PM
> > Subject: Re: 3ware 7506, FreeBSD 4.x, Maxtor Disks & SMART Problems.
> >
> >
> >
> >>Hi, in reference to this
> >>http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2004-June/007828.html
> >>
> >>I have a FreeBSD 4.10-p2 system, using a 7450 with 4xMAXTOR 6L080J4  (80
> >>gig) disks.
> >>
> >>Raid 5 setup.
> >>
> >>      Monitor version: ME7X 1.01.00.035
> >>      Firmware version: FE7X 1.05.00.036
> >>      BIOS version: BE7X 1.08.00.044
> >>
> >>
> >>(Firmware 7.5.3 basically).
> >>
> >>I am also having the same problems you are having.  Randomly under heavy
> >
> > I/O
> >
> >>the system will just halt I/O requests.  No error messages on the
console,
> >>it would just start to hang and halt completely.  (no kernel panics at
> >
> > all).
> >
> >>I believe I have the same problem you do.  Were you able to resolve the
> >>issue or narrow it down?  The machine is not local, but I am curious if
> >
> > you
> >
> >>did resolve it, what version of FreeBSD did you have?  What firmware?
And
> >>did you have to do the powermax testing on all the disks or not?
> >>
> >>I cannot easily do the powermax testing yet, and my firmware is older
and
> >
> > I
> >
> >>am still running into this problem (which should have all the twe driver
> >>fixes).
> >>
> >>I tried using "Smartmontools" to verify if the Maxtor disks are okay
since
> >>they only work for Linux + 3Ware.
> >>
> >>Thanks in advance!
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>- Carroll Kong
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>_______________________________________________
> >>freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> >>http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> >>To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to
"freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >
> >
>



More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list