Re: Known-good LSI PCIe SAS HBAs?

[Konstantinos Skarlatos <k.skarlatos@gmail.com>]

Hello
Any news on the mvsas driver for this card? the MV8 is a ridiculously 
attractive card, and proper linux support would be a boon to many people 
who want to use it on their fileservers.


On 13/11/2009 8:59 μμ, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
> On Fri November 13 2009, Kristleifur Daðason wrote:
>    
>> On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 6:51 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom<tfjellstrom@shaw.ca>
>>      
> wrote:
>    
>>> On Wed November 11 2009, Richard Scobie wrote:
>>>        
>>>> Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
>>>>          
>>>>> Thats the problem he was trying to get away from. the MV8
>>>>> controller likes to offline disks when a few smart commands arrive.
>>>>> at least with the main kernel drivers. But then the main kernel
>>>>> mvsas drivers decide to give up if you even attempt to start a raid
>>>>> array on them. The controller locks up and you have to reboot. Most
>>>>> of the time a reboot even fails when it tries to sync the block
>>>>> devices, so a hard reset is in order.
>>>>>            
>>>> OK, I did not know the Marvell controller also has a problem with
>>>> smartmontools.
>>>>          
>>> Given the state of the in kernel drivers, its probably a driver issue.
>>>        
>> Thanks for the replies, all.
>>
>> I'll bet it's the driver - it doesn't feel quite right that a random
>> external command can easily drop drives off the controller, be it
>> smartmontools or mdadm.
>>
>> Thomas, I tried sending a private email to Andy Yan. I haven't got a
>> reply, which kind of isn't surprising in this world of spam. Can I ask
>> you for a referral - could you send him an email asking him if I can
>> have the patch and how to test it?
>>      
> He seems to be a busy guy, but I've CCed him on this. The actual driver I
> got is a full copy of the driver, builds out of tree.
>
> He hasn't said I can't send the package to anyone, but I'll wait a little
> while before doing so, he might pop up saying not to give it out.
>
> All I can say is: it works well enough for me*.
>
> For a $120 8 port sata card, it really does the trick. I was so glad when I
> didn't have to get several crappy 2-4 port jmicron cards.
>
>    
>> Also, to list-dwellers: I'd greatly appreciate further tips on PCIe SAS
>>   HBAs.
>>
>> Thanks!
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>>      
> * Performance (to me) is outstanding, or at least it will be once the write
> back stuff is fixed up, and the io controller stuff is also fixed up, but as
> is right now in 2.6.31, its "good enough". Might not get the absolute insane
> 400-500MB/s I saw with the controller originally, but I do get a good
> 100-230MB/s off my 5 drive md raid5 array (512KB chunk). I find things that
> used to take 30 seconds or more on my old array now happen in a few seconds.
> Right now writes are rather bad (60-100MB/s) but that I assume is the write
> back stuff, which should hopefully be fixed in 32.
>
>    

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