Areca Weirdness

[Clayton Milos]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawrence Farr" <freebsd-smp at epcdirect.co.uk>
To: <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 4:51 PM
Subject: RE: Areca Weirdness


> Re-posting to -STABLE as it also does it on i386.
>
> I reinstalled i386 stable as of yesterday, and newfs'd all the partitions
> "just in case". I got it to crash while doing a mkdir on the areca
> partition, so set up crash dumps on the boot drive (it boots off a single
> ATA disk, the Areca is additional storage) and it died again running
> the periodic scripts last night. The info file from the dump shows:
>
> Dump header from device /dev/ad0s1b
>  Architecture: i386
>  Architecture Version: 2
>  Dump Length: 2145452032B (2046 MB)
>  Blocksize: 512
>  Dumptime: Thu Nov 16 03:01:09 2006
>  Hostname: nas-2.shorewood-epc.co.uk
>  Magic: FreeBSD Kernel Dump
>  Version String: FreeBSD 6.1-20061115 #0: Wed Nov 15 04:18:11 UTC 2006
>    root at monitor.shorewood-epc.co.uk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SMP
>  Panic String: ufs_dirbad: bad dir
>  Dump Parity: 632980830
>  Bounds: 0
>  Dump Status: good
>
> Am I expecting too much with partitions over 2Tb? I've never gone over
> 2Tb before, so havent come across any issues like this.
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org
>> [mailto:owner-freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Lawrence Farr
>> Sent: 10 November 2006 11:39
>> To: freebsd-amd64 at freebsd.org
>> Subject: Areca Weirdness
>>
>> I've got an Areca 12 port card running a 6Tb array which is divided
>> into 2.1Tb chunks at the moment, as it was doing the same with a
>> single 6Tb partition.
>>
>> ad0: 58644MB <IC35L060AVER07 0 ER6OA44A> at ata0-master UDMA100
>> da0 at arcmsr0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
>> da0: <Areca Arc1 R001> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device
>> da0: 166.666MB/s transfers (83.333MHz, offset 32, 16bit),
>> Tagged Queueing
>> Enabled
>> da0: 2224922MB (4556640256 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 283637C)
>>
>> If I newfs it, and copy data to it, I have no problem initially.
>> If I then try and copy the data on the disk already to a new
>> folder, the machine reboots (it's a remote host with no serial
>> attached currently). When it comes back to life, it mounts, and
>> shows as:
>>
>> /dev/da0       2.1T    343G    1.6T    18%    /usr/home/areca1
>>
>> But is completely empty. Unmounting it and trying to fsck it
>> errors, as does mounting it by hand.
>>
>> [root at nas-2 /home]# fsck -y /dev/da0
>> ** /dev/da0
>> Cannot find file system superblock
>> ioctl (GCINFO): Inappropriate ioctl for device
>> fsck_ufs: /dev/da0: can't read disk label
>> [root at nas-2 /home]# mount /dev/da0
>> mount: /dev/da0 on /usr/home/areca1: incorrect super block
>>
>> Are there any known issues with the driver on AMD64? I had
>> major issues with it on Linux/386 with large memory support
>> (it would behave equally strangely) that went away when I
>> took large memory support out, maybe there are some non 64
>> bit safe parts common to both?

I have the Areca 8 port PCI-X card. 2 arrays of 1.25T each and no issues 
yet. I've been using it on 5.x for a year and now on 6.x it's perfect too.
Have you updated the card to the latest firmware ?

I've just done a test copy from the one volume to the other of 10 gigs. It 
ran at over 80M/s and tok under 2 minutes with no errors.

Did you follow the instructions provided with the Areca card for creating 
volumes over 2TB ? There are some things you have to do so that the OS works 
correctly with it.

-Clay