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

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 05:07:51PM -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 `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.
> 
> 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.

You can do this without these horrible timer hacks by setting sdev->timeout
to a bigger value in your ->slave_configure method.