"Request Requeued/Retrying Command" with twa card on FreeBSD 6.0

Vinod Kashyap vkashyap at amcc.com
Mon Dec 19 18:40:52 PST 2005


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Mike Andrews
> Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 6:10 PM
> To: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org
> Subject: "Request Requeued/Retrying Command" with twa card on 
> FreeBSD 6.0
> 
> I've got a weird but apparently minor issue with a 3Ware 
> 9500S-4LP in a FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE system...
> 
> When the system is run with boot.verbose="YES" in 
> /boot/loader.conf, I get these messages on the console:
> 
> (da0:twa0:0:0:0): Request Requeued
> (da0:twa0:0:0:0): Retrying Command
> (da0:twa0:0:0:0): Request Requeued
> (da0:twa0:0:0:0): Retrying Command
> (repeat a few dozen times each time)
> 
> ...during some heavy disk activity, like, for example, 
> qpopper rewriting a 50 MB mailbox.  (I know qpopper's a bit 
> of a slug.)  Not all heavy disk IO triggers it, though; I can 
> do something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testfile 
> bs=10485760 count=128" followed by "dd if=/tmp/testfile 
> of=/dev/null bs=10485760" and have it complete without a 
> single SCSI timeout message.
> 
> Turn boot.verbose="NO" off and the messages go away, but IO 
> still lags badly.
> 
> "camcontrol tags" says it has 254 tag openings, which seems 
> like a bit much.  Dropping down to 16 seems to make the 
> messages go away.
> 
> Do the twa cards even do TCQ between the card and the OS?  
> From what I understand, they won't do NCQ between the card 
> and the SATA disks, even if you have something like 
> Barracudas that support it -- you need the new 3Ware 9550 
> card for that.
> 
> If they don't, why does it advertise 254 tags, and if it 
> does, why does it seem to choke on the default setting of 254?
> 

Although the driver can handle 254 simultaneous requests, if the I/O's,
are big, there's the possibility that the firmware cannot accept new
requests
even if 254 has not been hit.  In that case, the driver will have to ask
CAM to requeue the requests.

> Other than laggy IO (shell prompts hang, MP3's skip for 5 - 
> 30 seconds) there aren't any actual IO errors or anything 
> else wrong, which for this particular system is just minor 
> annoyance instead of serious problem. 
> 5.4-RELEASE did the same thing.  I have an apparent 
> workaround, I'm just trying to sanity-check it and its necessity.
> 
> This is an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe board, so I'm running the twa 
> card in a 32-bit slot.  The system is otherwise totally idle 
> when this happens, no interrupt storms, USB and Firewire 
> disabled in the BIOS so we don't have IRQs shared with 
> Giant-locked drivers...
> 
> dmesg, vmstat -i, other stuff available on request if needed. 
>  Kernel config is the stock 'SMP' one.
> 
> 
> 
> Mike Andrews  *  mandrews at bit0.com  *  http://www.bit0.com
> It's not news, it's Fark.com.                  Carpe cavy!
> 
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