3Ware delayed device mounting errors with newer 9500 series adapters

Jeffrey V. Merkey
2006-10-21T16:54:58Z

Adam,

We have been getting 3Ware 9500 series adapters in the past 60 days
which exhibit a delayed behavior during mounting of FS from
/etc/fstab. The adapters older than this do not exhibit this behavior.

During bootup, if the driver is compiled as a module rather than in
kernel, mount points such as /var in fstab fail to detect the devices
until the system fully boots, at which point the /dev/sdb etc. devices
showup. It happens on both ATA cabled drives and drives
cabled with multi-lane controller backplanes.

The problem is easy to reproduce. Install ES4, point the /var directory
during install to one of the array devices in disk druid, and after
the install completes, /var/ will not mount during bootup and all sorts
of errors stream off the screen. I can reproduce the problem
with several systems in our labs and upon investigating the adapter
revisions, I find that adapters ordered in the past 60 days exhibit
the problem. Compiling the driver in kernel gets around the problem,
indicating its timing related.

Jeff