geom_fox and isp ... or something else?

[Paul Chvostek]

Hiya.

${DAYJOB} has a long history with Novell.  In the epic battle I wage for
acceptance of FreeBSD alongside SLES, multipathing has come up.

We have a nifty new SAN.  We have multipathing-capable drivers for
Windows.  We have instructions from Novell on how to set up multipathing
in SLES (though some list traffic that suggests that Qlogic behaviour is
less than stellar).

I've been able to wheedle a pair of Qlogic cards (purchased because
corporate standards are more important than verifying a product's
usefulness) connected to a box for testing.  The SAN is insanely fast,
but of course multipathing doesn't work.

I've seen Pawel's GEOM_ROME tease from early 2004.  While I'd love to
have a "full, finished multipathing implementation", I'd also happily
stick with geom_fox with whatever hardware combination or custom hacks
are required, if I could just get it to pass a link failure test.

I'm seeing the same behaviour as has been noted -- if the link goes
down, isp doesn't notice, so no failover happens.  When the link is
down, the system grinds to a halt waiting for the disk to be available.

I've found old freebsd-geom posts (Poul, Pawel, Andrew) that mention isp
driver problems and potential patches, but if somebody's written a fix,
I can't find it.  Does it exist?

If Qlogic adapters are a no-go (because I can neither write nor fund the
required fix), has someone gotten FC multipathing to work with Adaptec
or LSI adapters?

*Is* there a way to get fibre-channel multipathing working, so this
expensive SAN can be used with an OS more robust than Windows?

- 6.1-RELEASE
- isp0, isp1
- ispfw
- /dev/da1 through /dev/da8 (paths)
- geom_fox gives me /dev/da8.fox

I am in a position to test things.

Thanks.  :)

p

-- 
  Paul Chvostek                                             <paul at it.ca>