RE: Fw: [Bugme-new] [Bug 3651] New: dell poweredge 4600 aacraidPERC 3/Di Container goes offline

[Ryan Anderson <ryan@autoweb.net>]

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On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 17:07 -0500, Salyzyn, Mark wrote:
> Do you have the latest Firmware from Dell? Do you have the Read and
> Write Cache disabled as Dell has recommended (for pre 6091(?) Firmware)?

The latest Dell firmware that I have seen is 6092, which would seem to
make your second question irrelevant.  Is that correct?

dmesg says this about the controller:
AAC0: kernel 2.8.4 build 6092
AAC0: monitor 2.8.4 build 6092
AAC0: bios 2.8.0 build 6092
AAC0: serial 83ac41d3fafaf001
scsi0 : percraid
  Vendor: DELL      Model: PERCRAID RAID5    Rev: V1.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
  Vendor: DELL      Model: PERCRAID RAID5    Rev: V1.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02

> The `container going offline' is a result of the Firmware in the card
> not responding to a SCSI command within 60 seconds (the Linux SCSI layer
> timeout). In the older firmware this would occur at the combination of
> high load, drive or scsi bus problems and the card flushing the cache.
> If the problem persists, preventing the card building up a large amount
> of cache data may be the only way to mitigate this.

Ok, I can experiment with this.  Where should I start?  (I'm not afraid
of source-level hacking, just don't know where to start.)

> I have had others experiment with overriding the SCSI timeout (the
> Adaptec driver branch has an AAC_EXTENDED_TIMEOUT) to limited success.
> Turning off the SCSI timeout (add a scsi_del_timer as command is issued
> to the controller, and a scsi_add_timer in the interrupt service routine
> before completion) worked extremely well, but this makes me
> understandably nervous.

That completely disables *any* timeout, correct?
That would make me a .. bit nervous, too.

I'm going to try to build a load today that can trigger the problem.
(It's rather hard to debug when the problem is very hard to trigger -
sigh)


-- 

Ryan Anderson                
AutoWeb Communications, Inc. 
email: ryan@autoweb.net 

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