FreeBSD 6 (or 7) on a HP DL140 G3 SATA

[J. Martin Petersen]

Peter Losher wrote:
> Just got my hands on a HP DL140 G3 (generation 3) server, which has a
> LSI Logic SAS controller.  

I suppose you mean the one with the hot-swappable disks?

 > You can run the live CD or install FreeBSD
> (6.2-RC1 or 7-CURRENT) onto the HD's, but when you boot from the disks,
> the boot loader barfs:
> 
> -=-
> int=0000000d  err=0000001a  efl=00030287  eip=0000291d
> eax=1400000a  ebx=00000b3e  ecx=00000000  edx=0000c900
> esi=00000d1c  edi=00000001  ebp=00000206  esp=00000200
> cs=c900  ds=9a00  es=9a00    fs=0000  gs=0000  ss=9a00
> cs:eip=cc 68 32 06 ff 34 e8 db-fc 83 c4 04 89 46 fe 5f
>        5e c9 c3 55 8b ec 1e 33-c0 8e d8 a0 75 04 3c 00
> ss:esp=1c 0d 02 00 00 00 34 02-d8 45 1c 0d 00 00 00 14
>        00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00-1c 0d 02 00 00 00 00 00
> BTX halted
> -=-
> 
> Here is the relevant BIOS output from the controller:
> 
> -=-
> LSI Logic Corp. MPT SAS BIOS
> MPTBIOS-6.06.08.00 (2006.05.16)
> Copyright 2000-2006 LSI Logic Corp.
> 
> 
> SLOT ID  LUN VENDOR   PRODUCT          REVISION   CAPACITY
> ---- --- --- -------- ---------------- ---------- ----------
>   3          LSILogic SAS1068-IR       1.10.01.00
> -=-
> 
> Has anyone gotten one of these to run FreeBSD from the HD's successfully?

Yes; we got similar results until we upgraded the system BIOS and the 
controller firmware (both are available somewhere on hp.com).

We're now having a different problem; once -CURRENT (or 6.2-RC1) is 
installed and running, the disk performance is abysmal. I/O-wise it is 
maxing out around 6MB/sec, which seems far from impressive.

We have tried both with and without RAID configured through the 
controller (i.e., with RAID-1 and with just two seperate disks), and 
results are identical.

There does not seem to be any spurious interrupts, and there is no load 
on the system when doing disk I/O. This is for -CURRENT as of yesterday 
evening (after the latest commits to dev/mpt).

Martin