twa (3ware 9690SA) error on shutdown

[Maxim Khitrov]

I'm playing around with the 3ware 9690SA raid controller. At first, I
was using FreeBSD 8.0-BETA2, but it kept encountering errors after
start-up and on shutdown. There is no 8.x driver on the 3ware site, so
I decided to go back to 7.2-RELEASE. This, however, did not solve the
problem. The major one that I'm having right now is that the system
refuses to reboot. After issuing the command, this is what I see
toward the end:

Uptime: 9h41m43s
twa0: ERROR: (0x15: 0x1104): Internal request timed out: request =
0xfffffffe80223a28
twa0: INFO: (0x16: 0x1108): Resetting Controller...:
twa0: INFO: (0x04: 0x0001): Controller reset occurred: resets=1
twa0: INFO: (0x16: 0x1107): Controller reset done!:
twa0: ERROR: (0x15: 0x1015): Can't close connection with controller: error = 60
twa0: ERROR: (0x05: 0x2015): Failed to shutdown Common
Layer/controller: error = 60

Here the system freezes and I have to hold the power button for 5 sec
to turn the power off and then restart. This happened with the default
twa driver, so I downloaded the 9.5.2 code set from 3ware website and
tried to use the twa.ko that comes with that release (for amd64). This
also did not fix the problem.

There is one other issue that may be related to this one. The verify
process for a newly created array is never finished. When the system
is started, I see a "verify started" message and the activity leds of
the drivers connected to the controller light up. If I reboot the
system at this point, the first problem does not occur. On other hand,
if I wait maybe 5 minutes the activity lights turn off, indicating
that something happens to the verify process, and at this point I can
no longer reboot the system.

My guess is that the verify process causes some sort of a problem for
the driver or the controller itself, which then prevents normal
communication during shutdown. Has anyone else encountered this
problem or has a solution for it?

- Max