Stable SATA pci card for FreeBSD 6.x/7.0

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 11:37:16AM +0200, Sebastiaan van Erk wrote:
> Yes, good thing you pointed this out, I hadn't seen those yet:
>
> Aug  5 11:15:05 piglet kernel: rl1: watchdog timeout
> Aug  5 11:15:05 piglet kernel: ad6: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=218885455
> Aug  5 11:15:05 piglet kernel: ad4: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=218885455
> Aug  5 11:15:10 piglet kernel: rl1: watchdog timeout
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: rl1: watchdog timeout
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: ad6: FAILURE - device detached
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: subdisk6: detached
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: ad6: detached
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: rl1: watchdog timeout
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: rl1: watchdog timeout
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: ad4: FAILURE - device detached
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: subdisk4: detached
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: ad4: detached
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm1: provider ad6 disconnected.
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm1: provider ad4 disconnected.
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm1: provider mirror/gm1 destroyed.
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: GEOM_MIRROR: Device gm1 destroyed.
> Aug  5 11:15:31 piglet kernel: g_vfs_done():mirror/gm1s1e[WRITE(offset=111376236544, length=16384)] error = 6

Kudos to Andrey for asking a simple yet incredibly benefitial question.

You have a much greater problem here, and it doesn't look specific to
your disks.  It looks as if an interrupt is stalled or locked.  I'm
willing to bet your rl1 Realtek NIC and your ATA controller (associated
with disks ad4 and ad6) use the same IRQ.  vmstat -i output should help
clear that up, or dmesg output.

I'll tell you that there have been some watchdog timeout fixes committed
to rl(4) in recent months, depending upon what specific model and
revision of Realtek NIC you have.  No offence intended, but Realtek is
definitely the worst of the bunch.  I'm willing to bet it's an on-board
NIC too.  :-)

I'm CC'ing PYUN Yong-Hyeon here, as he presently maintains/works on the
rl(4) driver, and might be able to help determine if the Realtek NIC is
what's causing all of this, or if the ATA chipset (is this the VIA?  We
don't know yet) is causing it first.

Finally, what motherboard brand and model is this, and what BIOS
revision or version?

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |