Re: IRQ issues with multiple SiI3114's on Kernel 3.2

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

On 7/27/2012 9:20 PM, Stirling Westrup wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Stirling Westrup <swestrup@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote:
>>> On 7/27/2012 11:40 AM, Stirling Westrup wrote:
>>>
>>>> I recently purchased a large system for use as a backup server for a
>>>> pair of small businesses. It contains a boot drive plus 10 more
>>>> storage drives. Despite having three onboard SATA controllers, the
>>>> motherboard didn't have enough SATA connectors for all the drives, so
>>>> I installed a pair of identical SiI3114 raid cards to handle the extra
>>>> connections. It has a Sandy Bridge chipset, so I installed a 3.2
>>>> kernel.
>>>>
>>>> # uname -a
>>>> Linux ttt 3.2.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 #1 SMP Fri Jun 29 20:42:29 UTC 2012
>>>> x86_64 GNU/Linux
>>> ...
>>>> Okay, enough background. Here's the issue: I had no trouble building
>>>> and sync'ing the first array, but when I try to sync the second array,
>>>> I always get the following dmesg an hour or so into the process:
>>>>
>>>> irq 19: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
>>>> [  346.120572] Pid: 1100, comm: md1_resync Not tainted
>>> 3.2.0-0.bpo.2-amd64 #1
>>>> [  346.120573] Call Trace:
>>>> ...
>>>> [  346.120697] handlers:
>>>> [  346.120699] [<ffffffffa00479e0>] ahci_interrupt
>>>> [  346.120702] [<ffffffffa02f17ec>] sil_interrupt
>>>> [  346.120703] Disabling IRQ #19
>>>> [  346.122145] sched: RT throttling activated
>>> ...
>>>> From this point onward syncing drops to a tiny fraction of its
>>>> previous speed. I've tried booting with 'irqpoll' as the error message
>>>> suggests, but it has had no effect. I'm really not sure if there is a
>>>> conflict between my two SiI3114's or between the SiI's and the Marvell
>>>> controller (although I've never had an issue with Marvell in the
>>>> past), nor how to go about diagnosing or fixing this.  I'll include a
>>>> full dmesg dump below, as well as my currently loaded modules. If
>>>> anyone wants any further info, just ask.
>>>
>>> Have you tried irqbalance to spread the interrupts across cores/cache
>>> domains? https://irqbalance.org/documentation.html
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the tip! I installed irqbalance and rebooted the system,
>> and everything has been running smoothly for the last two hours. I'll
>> let everyone know tomorrow if it actually finished the full 20-hour
>> resync without incidence.

> Alas, all it did was delay the IRQ error by a few hours. Does anyone
> else have any ideas about how I could tackle this?

Try irqpoll and irqbalance together.  Also, which motherboard is this,
exact make/model please.  May be a BIOS issue.  Doesn't seem to be using
MSIs.  If the mobo and cards all support MSIs, enabling that may fix
this as well.

Also what make/model are the SiI3114 cards?  PCIe or PCI?  Have you
tried different slot combinations?  Moving one card to a different slot
may get it routed to PCI INTB instead of INTA.  That may get it mapped
to something other than IRQ#19.  Updating the 3114 boards to their
latest firmware is worth a shot, if not there already.

-- 
Stan