FreeBSD on Dell r210 (SAS 6/ir)

Peggy Wilkins enlil65 at gmail.com
Wed Feb 23 17:43:54 UTC 2011


On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Sergio de Almeida Lenzi
<lenzi.sergio at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a dell with 2 dual xeon 6 cores, dual thread cpus (24 logical
> cpus)
> with that famous perc6 controller, running FreeBSD 8.2 and with
> journaling FS (one partition) and 2 SAS drivers of 160GB.
>
> The controller blocks almost all the time.. message is timeout.....
>
> I used the mfi config utility (in the ports) and enable write cache.
> it now works ok (no more timeouts) but sometimes (once a week)
> it panics the system.  A fix in the gjournal appears today (cvsup)
> and I hope it can fix the problem...

I have seen many reports of the mfi timeout problem, and I was seeing
this on one of my Dell servers as well.  All the problem reports I've
seen have involved the mfi driver, but sometimes it is PERC5 or PERC6,
other times it has been H700 or H800.  It appears we have the same
CPU?  Intel Xeon X5680 (Intel Westmere).  I fixed the timeout problem
on my server by updating some settings in the BIOS.  Here are the
details.

The following should all be set to "disabled" (they are enabled by default):

Processor Options:
 - Turbo Mode
 - C1E
 - C-States

Turbo mode allows overclocking of the CPU when certain conditions
occur.  C-States and C1E have to do with ACPI; see the section on
Processor States at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acpi for more info.

You may also want to make sure your BIOS is set for "Maximum
Performance".  Sorry, I don't recall off hand which config section
this is found under.

plw


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