iir + Tyan S2460 + SMP problems

[John-Mark Gurney]

Douglas K. Rand wrote this message on Fri, Apr 21, 2006 at 17:31 -0500:
> Doug> We're having problems with FreeBSD 5.4, 6.0, and 6.1 and an ICP
> Doug> Vortex GDT8546RZ 4 port SATA RAID
> 
> John-Mark> We've had very similar experiences on 4.7-R.  The box would
> John-Mark> hang on one partition waiting for IO to come back, but
> John-Mark> direct access to the disk, or accessing other partitions
> John-Mark> would pass IO fine.
> 
> Interesting, the opposite of our problems. It works perfectly for us
> on 4.x systems, but not in 5.4 and 6.x.

So far we haven't hand any issues w/ 6.0 w/ the iir drivers from 6.1
yet.. but we also haven't deployed our product into production...  On
5.4-R we got a few months in before we had the hangs and had to ditch
5.4-R...

> Doug> Any advice is welcome. Well, except for "dump the Tyan S2460
> Doug> motherboards" maybe.
> 
> John-Mark> How about drop iir?
> 
> While not as expensive as switching motherboards, still a pain. We've
> been very happy with our ICP cards. But your suggestion does have
> merit, especially as recent PCI-X and PCI-E ICP cards have no FreeBSD
> driver in sight.

I wouldn't be surprised if the other motherboard could exhibit the
hang too..  since I believe it's a firmware race condition, and the
other motherboard may have different timing characteristics that makes
the hang less likely...

/me has zero trust in iir cards until Adaptec/ICP-Vortex admits there
is a problem and fixes it.

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."