DELL SC430 & ahd0: <Adaptec 39320A Ultra320 SCSI adapter>

[Justin T. Gibbs]

> My dell Sc430 Server with Freebsd 5.4 gives soon after a reboot and minimal
> harddisk actions (erase a file or directory) strange messages concerning
> Adaptec SCSI adapter:

>From what I can tell from the full card dump state, the 39320 attempted
to send 77 transactions to your drive during a single connection.  This
connection hung, and the timeout occurred.  Since the drive controlls
the connection, it can cut the initiator off at any time if too many
commands are sent.  So, this looks like a drive firmware bug.  You
should contact Dell to find out if newer firmware is available for your
drive.  In the mean time, you can try lowering the tag depth allowed
for your device.  If the failure occurs sometime after rc processing,
you can make a call early in the transition to multi-user like so:

	camcontrol tags da0 -N 64 # or some lower number

If that won't work for you, you can enter a quirk into sys/cam/cam_xpt.c
or just modify the last quirk entry (the default) to have a lower tag
depth (it is currently 255).

If you do get new firmware for your drive and that resolves this issue,
please follow up to the list (and cc me if you don't mind) so that
others that encounter the same issue can benefit from your experience.

--
Justin