[5.4-p6] Trouble with swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer on LSI(PERC4)-RAID on Dell PE6650

[Jim Pingle]

Raphael H. Becker wrote:
> Hi *,
> 
> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: device amrd1s1d, blkno 77 
> 
> Any access to the RAID is impossible (e.g. login on console, shutdown,
> ... ), have to powercycle it.
> 
> What is the meaning of this message? 

I have encountered this error once before, and it meant that it timed out
trying to access the disk/partition where swap was. It also coincided with a
network card (fxp0) timeout, but I'm not sure that was related. The system
was unresponsive from the console or remotely until it was completely power
cycled, the reset button wasn't enough.

> What is the causation for this error? 

Probably a disk/controller/SCSI timeout of some sort

> amr0: <LSILogic MegaRAID 1.51> mem 0xfce00000-0xfce0ffff irq 21 at device 1.0 on pci3

Mine also happened to be on an LSI/amr based card, but not a Dell. It's an
older dual CPU PIII-800.

> Is there anything I can do?
> Any switches? sysctl?
> Is 6.0-RELEASE or will 6.1-RELEASE be a solution for that?
> Any patches in 5-STABLE?

In my case, after some hair pulling, it turned out to be a bad SCSI cable.
You might check your cabling and termination, and perhaps swap the cable
even if it looks good -- mine looked better than the cable I replaced it with.

Jim