FreeBSD 4.11-Release IPS device issues

[Anthony Downer]

David,

Nice to hear it is not just me!

Cheers,
Anthony. 

-----Original Message-----
From: David Sze [mailto:dsze at alumni.uwaterloo.ca] 
Sent: 07 April 2005 14:31
To: Anthony Downer
Cc: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 4.11-Release IPS device issues

At 09:13 AM 06/04/2005 +0100, Anthony Downer wrote this to All:
>Hello Folks,
>
>(I am afraid) we are using FreeBSD as the initial boot/hardware/disk 
>configuration tool for our Standard Windows Server builds.
>
>We have a bootable CD that identifies hardware, partitions disk zero, 
>copies the install files over and commences the Windows installation 
>process.
>
>This is working fine on a large number of machines/scsi controllers, 
>but the ServeRAID is causing some issues.
>I am attempting to use the 4.11-Release IPS driver on an IBM xSeries 
>342 with a ServeRAID 4Lx RAID controller.
>(Controller BIOS/Firmware 7.10.18 - Two 18GB drives in a mirrored
>formation)
>
>Whilst we have successfully tested 5.3 with the IPS driver for this 
>purpose we are getting some odd errors in 4.11 (At this time it is not 
>possible to migrate to 5.3 for our purposes)
>
>When copying a large number of files (the i386 folder) using cp from a 
>mounted CD to a DOS formatted partition on ipsd0 we are getting the 
>following errors:
>---cut here---
>devstat_end_transaction: HELP!! busy_count for ipsd0 is < 0 (-1)!
>panic: vwakeup: neg numoutput
>
>syncing disks... ips0: WARNING: command timeout. Adapter is in toaster 
>mode, resetting to known state
>devstat_end_transaction: HELP!! busy_count for ipsd0 is < 0 (-1)!
>ips0: resetting adapter, this may take up to 5 minutes
>ips0: syncing config
>ips0: ERROR: unable to get a command! can't sync cache!
>ips0: adapter clear failed
>ips0: AIEE! adapter reset failed, giving up and going home! Have a nice

>day.
>---cut here---

I get the same panic on an IBM xSeries 346 with a ServeRAID-7k
controller (Six 15K RPM 36GB drives, two as RAID1, four as RAID0).  The
panic occurs at random points while sysinstall is copying distributions.
If I do a minimal install, that completes successfully, but then the
same panic occurs while building a new kernel.

5.4-RC1 seems to work fine, but I'm in the same boat as you; my customer
doesn't want to upgrade to RELENG_5 yet.

I'm going to look at backporting the -CURRENT ips driver to RELENG_4,
I'll post patches (and a PR) if I'm successful.






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