Intel Matrixraid on amd64

[Benny Goemans]

Hi,

well, it's actually 4 disks in a mixed RAID 5 and RAID 0 solution. The data on 
the RAID 0 can be easily replaced, the important data and operating systems 
are on a RAID 5. On this RAID 5 there are multiple OS's running so there's no 
easy solution to migrating.
I know the Intel setup may be risky but it's been setup as-is and I really 
can't risk changing the setup itself at the moment (reinstalling all OS's 
etc). And until now it's been working nicely from 6.0-RELEASE up to 8.0-
RELEASE, all i386 architecture. Now I just need the AMD64 architecture up-and-
running :)
So I'm hoping this is some easily fixable thing. I should also be able to 
supply the necessary debugging info to whoever needs it.

Regards,

Benny Goemans

On Saturday 26 December 2009 21:11:18 Gót András wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I had this issue on an AMD64 FreeBSD installed machine. My problem was not
> with the freebsd driver. I assume it was working as written (FreeBSD stuff
> is quite well documented and working as documented). The real problem came
> at the reboot. I'd suggest to go with gmirror which is a transparent
> solution, so you can mount your drives separately also.
> 
> Imho, take a look at you config and if it's a transparent raid1 setup,
> just migrate easily to gmirror. For a RAID1 config you won't get much more
> speed with a real and relatively expensive raid card.
> 
> Yes, maybe I got paranoid after that hard weekend and also know that intel
> stuff works much better than nvidia when came to chipsets and the like.
> But I'd not give my data to a half-solution.
> 
> Andras
> 
> On Szo, December 26, 2009 6:40 pm, Benny Goemans wrote:
> > Hi András,
> >
> >
> > I am indeed aware of the risk that these kind of raid solutions bring
> > with them and if I would do the whole system anew I would just buy a
> > separate raid controller. The thing is that there's now around 1TB of
> > data in a raid configuration since one or two years and I can't change
> > raid controllers easily. This is especially hard since it's a tri boot
> > system (windows, freebsd and a test-os).
> >
> >
> > But I suppose that the driver is expected to work on amd64 just as it is
> > on i386, isn't it? After all everything is showing up fine, it just seems
> > to be that sysinstall has a problem using it (maybe the kernel but I'll
> > do some more tests to confirm).
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >
> > Benny Goemans
> >
> > On Friday 25 December 2009 18:30:49 Gót András wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >>
> >> I strongly advise against any of these "raid solutions". I got a very
> >> rough weekend beacuse of the nvidia raid. Here's the short story.
> >>
> >> I got our new webserver with S939 Opteron and the matched nvidia
> >> chipset. That time FreeBSD 6.1 was the actual, so that was installed.
> >> When
> >> installing I noticed that the motherboard raid works with FreeBSD so I
> >> went with it. It turned out that it's completely transparent so I was
> >> happy thinking that a simple solution is not likely to go wrong.
> >>
> >> On a weekend I went for the planned maintenance to the coloc facility.
> >> When the reboot came the motherboard nvidia raid told me that I have a
> >> failed Raid1 with one disk. The problem was that after this it refused
> >> to boot anymore. Later it turned out that somewhy 2 weeks ago! the
> >> nvidia raid dropped one disk and that left in that state (it was
> >> mountable, readable quite well etc.) and the other had the actual data.
> >>
> >> Both disk was replaced then beacause I told myself that at least I'd
> >> like to gain something out this huge downtime. Since then gmirror was
> >> used and tried what it would do if I take out one this. Gmirror handled
> >> it quite well, I got a message in the log about the disk failure and
> >> everything went on. With the software raid the nvidia controller or the
> >> disk backplane lost one disk after half a year of uptime but a reboot
> >> corrected it. (There was a small thread about this that time on a
> >> FreeBSD maillist.)
> >>
> >> On Pén, December 25, 2009 12:14 pm, Benny Goemans wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I'm running 8.0-release (i386) on a Asus P5WDG2 motherboard with
> >>> integrated Intel Matrixraid (software raid) controller. Everything
> >>> runs fine in this one.
> >>>
> >>> Since I've noticed 64 bit support for the Nvidia driver I've been
> >>> trying to install the AMD64 8.0 version. During install dmesg shows my
> >>> hard drives and raid drives (ar0, ar1)  perfectly, just as it does in
> >>> the i386 version. But when I enter sysinstall it can't locate my
> >>> drive(s). It just doesn't find a single drive, no arN but also no hdaN
> >>> (which do show up in
> >>> dmesg).
> >>>
> >>> Has anyone seen this behaviour before and is there some kind of
> >>> solution? Maybe some parameters to sysinstall, extra kernel modules to
> >>> load that are on the install disk or something?
> >>>
> >>> Kind regards,
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Benny Goemans
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> ps. I'm currently redownloading the iso file for the cd and will
> >>> check its checksum to make sure I don't have some bizarre bad download
> >>>  _______________________________________________
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