am2 MBs - 4g + SCSI wipes out root partition

[Adam McDougall]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 12:26:29PM -0400, Adam McDougall wrote:
>> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>>> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:45:29PM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:13:16 -0700
>>>> Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 11:30:57AM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
>>>>>> On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:29:37 -0300
>>>>>> JoaoBR <joao at matik.com.br> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I tried MBs as Asus, Abit and Gigabyte all same result
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Same hardware with SATA works perfect
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Same hardware with scsi up to 3.5Gigs installed works perfect
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> what calls my attention that all this MBs do not have the 
>>>>>>> memroy hole remapping feature so the complete 4gigs are 
>>>>>>> available what normally was not the case with amd64 Mbs for the 
>>>>>>> Athlon 64 CPUs
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> some has an opinion if this is a freebsd issue or MB falure or 
>>>>>>> scsi drv problem?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>> It's a driver problem.  If you want to use SCSI then you'll have to limit
>>>>>> memory to 3.5 GB.
>>>>> What you're saying is that Adaptec and LSI Logic SCSI controllers behave
>>>>> badly (and can cause data loss) on amd64 systems which contain more than
>>>>> 3.5GB of RAM.  This is a very big claim.
>>>>>
>>>>> Have you talked to Scott Long about this?
>>>>>
>>>>> Please expand on this, and provide evidence or references.  I need to
>>>>> document this in my Wiki if it is indeed true.
>>>>>
>>>> See the freebsd-scsi thread with Subject "data corruption with ahc driver
>>>> and 4GB of memory using a FBSD-8 64-bit installation?" from Wed, 30 Jan
>>>> 2008.
>>>>
>>>> This was for ahc, but the bit-rot which Scott mentions in his reply might
>>>> also apply to the LSI Logic controllers.
>>>>
>>>> Basically the driver doesn't correctly handle DMA above 4GB.  Since the PCI
>>>> hole gets mapped above 4GB it causes problems.  the (S)ATA drivers don't seem
>>>> to have this problem.
>>> Thank you -- this is the exact information I was looking for.
>>>
>>> I will update my Wiki page to reflect this quite major problem.
>>>
>> I am using some LSI (mpt driver) ultra4 (U320 scsi) and LSI SAS  
>> controllers in FreeBSD 7.x amd64 with 20G of ram, and Adaptec (aac  
>> driver) with a 5th generation RAID card with 8G of ram, both have no  
>> such corruption problems.  Providing this as a counter-example just to  
>> document some evidence of which products seem to work fine.
> 
> Is your LSI SAS controller driven by mpt(4) or mfi(4)?
> 
> Let's break down what we know for sure at this point:
> 
> aac(4) - not affected
> aha(4) - unknown
> ahb(4) - unknown
> ahc(4) - affected
> ahd(4) - unknown; no one answered the OP's question in the thread
> asr(4) - unknown
> ips(4) - unknown
> mpt(4) - not affected
> mfi(4) - unknown
> sym(4) - unknown
> 
> Could the problem be specific to certain firmware revisions on the
> cards?
> 
> Also adding Scott Long to the CC list.
> 

All the LSI I reported is driven by mpt, I have no mfi devices.