aac0 command timeouts

[Vivek Khera]

Today one of my admins noticed the following errors on a 6.0-REL-p4  
system (Sun X4100) with an Adaptec 2230SLP RAID card:

aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffff80841700 TIMEOUT AFTER 36 SECONDS
aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffff80846160 TIMEOUT AFTER 36 SECONDS
aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffff80843370 TIMEOUT AFTER 36 SECONDS
aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffff80841700 TIMEOUT AFTER 56 SECONDS
aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffff80846160 TIMEOUT AFTER 56 SECONDS
aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffff80843370 TIMEOUT AFTER 56 SECONDS

They were all logged at the same timestamp in /var/log/messages.

The card is hooked up to a Dell 14-disk hot-swap array with U320  
drives and backplane.

I poked around and found some references to this on the mailing lists  
for FreeBSD 4.x and 5.1, with references to "should be fixed in 5.2",  
but that seemed to be relating to the system locking up at boot.  I  
don't have that problem.

Some messages also indicate that it could be a firmware issue and  
updating firmware solved it for them.  This worries me since this  
system was built new last January so should have recent firmware in  
the drives.

Is this still a problem for other folks?

Also, what utilities can I use on FreeBSD 6 to probe  the drives for  
firmware.  I know with the LSI controllers the LSI command line  
utilities give you this info, but the Adaptec "aaccli" program  
doesn't have a way to find this out.

Also what strategy do people use for updating the firmware on drives  
hooked up to RAID cards?  The last time I tried this the updating  
program (dos boot CD) was unable to see the physical drives past the  
card.