3w-9xxx status in kernel

3w-9xxx status in kernel

[Stéphane Jourdois]

Hi,

I have a question about 3w-9xxx driver versions :

3w-9xxx version in vanilla 2.6.16 is 2.26.02.005
3w-9xxx version in 2.6.17-rc1-mm2 is 2.26.02.006

but :
3w-9xxx version in 3ware.com 9.3.0.3 codebase is 2.26.04.007


The documentation with 9.3.0.3 codebase says it will not works with
kernel driver <2.26.04.004. But I observe it works fine with codebase
9.3.0.2 (the documentation says it should not).

What is current status of 3w-9xxx driver in 2.6 ?
Will it works on a 9550SX using 9.3.0.3 firmware ?
Could you update documentation about that somewhere, for exemple in
3w-9xxx.c header ?

Thanks very much.

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Re: 3w-9xxx status in kernel

[Martin Honermeyer]

Hi,

same problem over here. Why does the newest kernel contain an old version of
the 3w-9xxx driver? 

We are having performance problems using a 9550SX controller. Read
throughput (measured with hdparm) is worse than on a Desktop system. We are
considering trying to replace it with the newest driver from 3ware.com.

Greetz,
Martin


Stéphane Jourdois wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have a question about 3w-9xxx driver versions :
> 
> 3w-9xxx version in vanilla 2.6.16 is 2.26.02.005
> 3w-9xxx version in 2.6.17-rc1-mm2 is 2.26.02.006
> 
> but :
> 3w-9xxx version in 3ware.com 9.3.0.3 codebase is 2.26.04.007
> 
> 
> The documentation with 9.3.0.3 codebase says it will not works with
> kernel driver <2.26.04.004. But I observe it works fine with codebase
> 9.3.0.2 (the documentation says it should not).
> 
> What is current status of 3w-9xxx driver in 2.6 ?
> Will it works on a 9550SX using 9.3.0.3 firmware ?
> Could you update documentation about that somewhere, for exemple in
> 3w-9xxx.c header ?
> 
> Thanks very much.
> 

Re: 3w-9xxx status in kernel

["Stéphane (kwisatz) Jourdois"]

Martin Honermeyer a écrit :
 > We are having performance problems using a 9550SX controller. Read
 > throughput (measured with hdparm) is worse than on a Desktop system. 
We are
 > considering trying to replace it with the newest driver from 3ware.com.

I saw somewhere in the knowledgebase on there website that 2.26.02 is 
newer than 2.26.04.

anyway :

Don't test using hdparm, it doesn't works (I don't know why). Test using 
bonnie++. I have 100MB/s throughput reading and writing on a 9550SX-12.
hdparm says 7MB/s.

Hope it helps.

Stéphane Jourdois.

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(((    Consultant securite  \ /    AGAINST HTML MAIL    )))
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Re: 3w-9xxx status in kernel

[Miquel van Smoorenburg]

In article <e2558p$o5f$2@sea.gmane.org>,
Martin Honermeyer  <maze@strahlungsfrei.de> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>same problem over here. Why does the newest kernel contain an old version of
>the 3w-9xxx driver? 
>
>We are having performance problems using a 9550SX controller. Read
>throughput (measured with hdparm) is worse than on a Desktop system. We are
>considering trying to replace it with the newest driver from 3ware.com.

The default settings for the 3w9xxx cards suck.

You need to make sure that the nr_requests (kernel request queue)
is at least twice the size of queue_depth (hardware requests queue).
Also the deadline or cfq i/o schedulers work a bit better for
database-like workloads.

Try something like this, replacing sda with the device name
of your 3ware controller.

	# Limit queue depth somewhat
	echo 128 > /sys/block/sda/device/queue_depth

	# Increase nr_requests
	echo 256 > /sys/block/sda/queue/nr_requests

	# Don't use as for database-like loads
	echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

CFQ seems to like larger nr_requests, so if you use CFQ, try 254
(maximum hardware size) for queue_depth and 512 or 1024 for nr_requests.

Oh, remember, if you have just created a RAID array on
the disks, wait with testing until the whole array has been
rebuild..

Mike.