www/106887: Update for Tyan Thunder h1000E (S3970) - Odd Drive Issues Under Load

[Nicole Harrington]

>Number:         106887
>Category:       www
>Synopsis:       Update for Tyan Thunder h1000E (S3970) - Odd Drive Issues Under Load
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-www
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Dec 19 03:00:28 GMT 2006
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     Nicole Harrington
>Release:        FreeBSD 6.1
>Organization:
>Environment:
FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE W Gjournal Patches dated 20061011
>Description:
Broadcom BCM 5785 / Socket F - 2x Opteron
Thunder h1000E (S3970)

Ostensibly the thunder board works fine - however there is perhaps a problem under heavy disk load.

 I swapped a Tyan S2881 Opteron MB for a new style Tyan Thunder h1000E Opteron motherboard in a production system that has 4 SATA hard drives and was running Squid 2.5.
 The system has been running just fine for some time. However, as soon as I replaced the MB, errors started occuring on the drives until the system paniced and rebooted. This repeated several times.
 I tried reformating the drives while using the new MB, to see if that would help. It did not.
 Since it was a production system, I was unable to spend much time troubleshooting.

 Since I was using an older rev of the gjournal patches I want to try it again sometime with the newer versions and/or a system that does not use them since the error seemed related to the gjournaling. However, even with the older patches, it was and is working fine again since changing back to the older Tyan S2881 Opteron Motherboard. So I do not think this could be related.
 It could be from having 3 or more drives, as I beleive the failures always occured on the 3rd and 4th drives. It almost seemed like it coudl not keep up.

 Sorry for the lack of real technical details.

 However, on systems with less disk load and/or disks, I have noticed no issues and indeed it works well.

>How-To-Repeat:
Utilize this board on a system under heavy disk load.

>Fix:

>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: