Stuck in geli

[Sean C. Farley]

On Tue, 5 Aug 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 05, 2008 at 10:45:16AM -0500, Sean C. Farley wrote:
>> Rarely, a geli partition I have freezes a process in bufwait state.
>> It occurs after an ATA timeout message:
>> Aug  5 03:47:13 thor kernel: ad10: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (1 retry left) LBA=219028637
>
> This looks like the issue I've been tracking for months now.  I'm sorry
> the document isn't complete; it's an issue of time...
>
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/ATA_issues_and_troubleshooting

Time grows on the tree next to my money tree.  :)  I understand.

>> The geli partition resides on an Intel MatrixRAID RAID1 mirror using
>> the ICH9R chipset (Asus P5K-E/WIFI).  Killing (even -9) the process
>> does not work.  Rebooting is the only solution, yet the system is
>> unable to flush the buffers and complete a clean unmounting.
>
> After reading my above Wiki page, I hope you consider disabling
> MatrixRAID and avoiding it entirely on FreeBSD.  There are patches to
> address major issues which have been sitting untouched, despite
> patches included, for 2+ years.  Draw your own conclusions.

Yuck.

I used the on-board "RAID", so the system could dual-boot Windows XP and
FreeBSD.

Is there any way to use gmirror to mirror the entire disk with XP on one
slice and FreeBSD on another?  ;)  OK.  I think I know that answer.
Does XP have software RAID1?  I can setup XP on one slice and gmirror on
another.

Is mirroring a slice any easier today?  I followed information from the
following links to do this before on my server:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-February/011699.html

I forget.  MatrixRAID does not destroy any data if RAID1 is disabled.
Correct?

> Also, you won't be able to kill -9 a process in that state.  The
> kernel (or some piece of it) is hung, not the process.  The fact that
> a reboot is required also does not surprise me.
>
> You *might* have been able to detach the ATA/SATA channel using
> atacontrol to get access to the system, but then again it might result
> in a system panic (see Wiki).

I did not feel safe even without a possible panic to detach the channels
and attach them again.  Would I not suffer data loss with everything
mounted?

*snip*

Sean
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org