6.2-R on Dell Poweredge 2950 with Dell PERC 5/i [mfi(4)]

[David Wolfskill]

On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 05:14:01PM -0600, Scott Long wrote:
> ...
> Not sure that this impression is entirely accurate.  The biggest problem
> with MFI machines is online RAID management.  The storage driver itself
> matured very quickly and has been very reliable.

Ah; good to know:  thank you.

> >Well, now a colleague is trying to run 6.2-R on one of these 2950s; dmesg
> >says the controller is:
> >
> >mfi0: <Dell PERC 5/i> mem 0xd80f0000-0xd80fffff,0xfc4e0000-0xfc4fffff irq 
> >78 at device 14.0 on pci2
> ...
> >and the disks looks like:
> >
> >mfid0: <MFI Logical Disk> on mfi0
> >mfid0: 418176MB (856424448 sectors) RAID volume '' is optimal
> >
> 
> Looks A OK to me.

Even better.  :-)

> >The intended production workload involves creation and deletion of
> >a large number of files rather rapidly.
> ...
> sysctl vfs.ffs.doasyncfree=0 might help.  Running the syncer more 
> frequently might also help, but I don't recall the sysctl node for
> that.

OK; I've relayed your suggestion to my colleague, but haven't heard back
from her yet.

> ...
> Very strange.  No chance that it was due to files that were deleted but
> still referenced by open apps?

I don't think so.  She's deployed 13 other boxen over the last few years
with -- naturally! -- different hardware specs, but all running
essentailly the same application.

The big question for her is whether or not the Dell 2950, as specified,
will do  the job.

> ...
> This sounds purely like a filesystem issue, not an MFI driver issue.

Hmmm... I'll admit to knowing little about RAID configurations; is it
possible that some RAID configurations might exacerbate problems with
such a workload -- or that others might be more amenable to it?

Thanks again!

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Believe SORBS at your own risk: 63.193.123.122 has been static since Aug 1999.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.
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