Odd incident with ZFS and an Aerca 1880i

[Dennis Glatting]

On Wed, 5 Oct 2011, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 08:37:20PM -0600, Dennis Glatting wrote:
>> I have a Aerca 1880i plugged into a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 running
>> RELENG_8 with a 10 2TB RAIDz pool with a OCZ Revo L2Arc and a SSD
>> ZIL, among other volumes. The last scrub indicated there was an
>> error with the pool and today I finally got around to cleaning
>> things up.
>>
>> During the scrub I initiated today, a running "zpool status"
>> displayed a message that said I should clear the pool, which I did,
>> while the scrub was running, which probably wasn't such a good idea.
>> The result was my disks through the Aerca disappeared. On a power
>> switch reboot the Aerca no longer displayed its boot-time messages
>> and it appears the Aerca's firmware is kaput.
>>
>> Specifically, during the boot sequence the following:
>>
>> "arcmsr0: timed out waiting for firmware ready"
>> "arcmsr0: wait 'get adapter firmware miscellaneous data' timeout"
>
> 1) The controller brand/vendor is Areca, not Aerca.  (This isn't just a 
> typo, you said it 3 times in your mail (including Subject).  :-) )
>
> 2) The arcmsr(4) man page does not mention the 1880i controller being
> supported.  Readers should note this controller is ***super*** new.
> It's a SATA600/SAS controller with PCIe 2.0:
> http://www.areca.com.tw/products/1880.htm
>
> My point:I am not surprised this is not working in RELENG_8.  This 
> controller, again, is **very** new on the market.
>

I have two of these cards across two systems, both RELENG_8 x86_64 (24GB 
of RAM in one, 12GB in the other). They have worked mostly without trouble 
since April (the first card) and July (the second). The only trouble was 
an ASUS RAMPAGE III EXTREME motherboard where the two cards in the same 
motherboard caused interrupt storms. When I replaced the ASUS with a 
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 the storm problem went away but I later moved the 
second card to a different machine.

The second card is in a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD9, BTW.


> 3) Areca provides FreeBSD support natively.  You should absolutely Email 
> them and bring the problem up with them via a support ticket.  They have 
> a good track record when it comes to support for FreeBSD in general. You 
> are absolutely going to need to mail them for such a new controller.
>

Already have.

I was surprised and confused that somehow I blew the firmware. I figured 
the fbsd fs wizards would be interested, if not amused.