More RedHat and Promise

[Justin T. Gibbs]

> Seems to be the week for problems with RedHat running with Promise
> Raids...

I do not have a very high opinion of these Promise external RAID
controllers.

...

> Dec 17 12:02:57 fx8 kernel:   0 SCB_CONTROL[0x64] SCB_SCSIID[0x7] SCB_LUN[0x0]
> SCB_TAG[0xe]

You can have the driver decode these registers for you by enabling register
pretty-printing.  If you had done so, you'd find that all of the pending
transactions on the controller on in the "disconnected" state.  In other
words, all of the transactions are pending on the Promise box and the
aic7xxx controller is waiting for the target device to reconnect and
complete or otherwise give status for these commands.  Recovery was
initiated after waiting 60 seconds for some response to the pending
commands.

Error recovery works better in the driver in the 6.3.X series.  This is
because the driver no longer relies on the broken Linux SCSI mid-layer's
idea of how to do recovery.  You can get newer driver versions here:

http://people.FreeBSD.org/~gibbs/linux/RPM/aic7xxx/

That said, the root problem appears to be in the Promise controller,
so I would encourage you to pester them for a fix.

--
Justin