mpt problems. (Re: Dell hardware raid 0 (sas5ir) or gmirror?)

Clayton Milos clay at milos.co.za
Sat Jan 27 23:49:15 UTC 2007


On Mon, Jan 15, 2007 at 09:21:08AM -0600, Joe Koberg wrote:
>
> I just bought two Dell PE-1950's to use as routers. They have LSI Logic
> PERC/5i's attached to 80GB SATA drives.  I am pretty sure this is the
> same card used for SAS.
>
> One thing is for sure, the mfi(4) card and driver aren't shy!  See below
> for examples of the kernel messages I get regularly.  I am sure drive
> failure would be well noted.
>
> As to rebuilding on-line, I suspect a drive (hot-)swap will initiate the
> rebuild.  There is a CLI tool (megarc) in ports/sysutils/megarc but I
> haven't tried to use it yet.
>
> All in all I would recommend the PERC/5i.
>

So I've just picked up a Dell PE-860, with the SAS card.  However it
doesn't appear to be an mfi(4) card, instead it's an mpt(4) card.

And, it doesn't appear to work properly; at least something isn't quite
right.

I've installed 6.2 on the box, and I'm attempting to create a gmirror
with both of the disks attached to the mpt.  I've created the filesystem
on one of the disks ok (gmirror boot0 on da1s1), and then I attempt
to insert the second disk (da0s1).

The problem is that the synchronisation appears to progress ok, but
when I add some additional load, like cvsuping the ports collection
at the same time, after a short period I get loads of errors from
the mpt controller and then geom disconnects the drive (da0s1).
Wierdly when I reboot the machine the mpt controller refuses to
probe da0, and I have to physically power cycle the machine before
it sees the drive again.

The error messages from mpt are attached in the file called 'messages'.
The kernel probe boot time log is attached as dmesg.log.

I hope there's a simple fix; I was hoping to commission this machine at
the end of this coming week!!!!

Joe


Hey Joe

If you have to power cycle the box for it to work again I'd say the problem 
is more than likely hardware related and not something FreeBSD unless the 
driver for the card has the ability to disable the drive on the raid 
controller which I doubt.

-Clay



More information about the freebsd-fs mailing list