From: Thomas Fjellstrom <hidden> Date: 2012-01-13 18:51:53
Is there chance this driver will ever be stable? After more than two years I'm
starting to get extremely frustrated. I don't really have the option at the
moment to get a new card, otherwise I would, likely a non marvell based
device.
It actually managed to last 10 days this time though. Which is a record. The
interesting thing is there are no warnings or errors in dmesg coming from the
mvsas driver or scsi code. All that's happened is processes lock up when
trying to write. Reading seems to be fine.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, it's a AOC-SASLP-MV8 card, has a
MV64460/64461/64462 chipset. And I have 7 (seagate 7200.12 SATA drives hooked
up).
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
thomas@fjellstrom.ca
From: Thomas Fjellstrom <hidden> Date: 2012-01-17 03:01:05
On Fri Jan 13, 2012, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
Is there chance this driver will ever be stable? After more than two years
I'm starting to get extremely frustrated. I don't really have the option
at the moment to get a new card, otherwise I would, likely a non marvell
based device.
It actually managed to last 10 days this time though. Which is a record.
The interesting thing is there are no warnings or errors in dmesg coming
from the mvsas driver or scsi code. All that's happened is processes lock
up when trying to write. Reading seems to be fine.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, it's a AOC-SASLP-MV8 card, has a
MV64460/64461/64462 chipset. And I have 7 (seagate 7200.12 SATA drives
hooked up).
I attached an 8th drive for kicks (for saving stuff temporarily that don't need
to be on the big array), and if anything, the array locks up more than it did
before. But there is one difference between the lockups that were happening and
that are happening now. Now the entire array is still readable. It just locks
up any process attempting to write to the array. Before both read and write
would lock up, and a bunch of scary messages would hit dmesg. Now there are
very few log messages about the array. In fact no messages show up from the
scsi or other subsystems. The only evidence of "bad things" happening is the
continual "process foo blocked for more than 120s" messages, and of course
anything attempting to write to the array.
Here's something interesting though, I just tried writing to the one disk on
the card that isn't part of the mdraid raid5 volume. It is fine. I can read
from it and write to it. So something to do with mdraid, or the XFS filesystem
(or both) is causing a bad interaction with the card itself.
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
thomas@fjellstrom.ca
Here's something interesting though, I just tried writing to the one disk on
the card that isn't part of the mdraid raid5 volume. It is fine. I can read
from it and write to it. So something to do with mdraid, or the XFS filesystem
(or both) is causing a bad interaction with the card itself.
Try doing IO to multiple drives simultaneously. I had a SIL card that would corrupt data when used
in RAID, but not single drive IO tests. I could make it fail by doing multiple dd/cp/md5sum to two
drives simultaneously.
Do yourself a favour. Whack it on fleabay and sell it to a Windows user, then get something
supported. Leave enough scatter around that people thinking of buying a card with that Marvell
chipset will stay clear.
Regards,
Brad
From: Simon McNair <hidden> Date: 2012-02-01 09:01:25
Hi Thomas,
I've been trying to get an answer to this same question (I have a
supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 too). See my post at
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/30/107 .
My only suggestion is to get a kernel that's pre 2.6.30 (my Thecus
5200 marvell based unit is on 2.6.13 and it seems okay). If the data
is mission critical I certainly wouldn't be using the latest kernels
in production until it had 6+months in a stress test environment (of
course I'm an obsessive apt-get upgrade which makes me a hypocrite
:-P).
I can see from searching lkml.org for mvsas that there is a lot of
code going in to this driver and unless your're a linux guru and can
fix these problems I can only suggest you keep anything important on a
=< 2.6.13 kernel and monitor the situation.
Oh, and keep back ups ;-) (again here's me being the hypocrite).
That's my plan :-(
Simon
On 13 January 2012 18:44, Thomas Fjellstrom [off-list ref] wrote:
Is there chance this driver will ever be stable? After more than two years I'm
starting to get extremely frustrated. I don't really have the option at the
moment to get a new card, otherwise I would, likely a non marvell based
device.
It actually managed to last 10 days this time though. Which is a record. The
interesting thing is there are no warnings or errors in dmesg coming from the
mvsas driver or scsi code. All that's happened is processes lock up when
trying to write. Reading seems to be fine.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, it's a AOC-SASLP-MV8 card, has a
MV64460/64461/64462 chipset. And I have 7 (seagate 7200.12 SATA drives hooked
up).
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
thomas@fjellstrom.ca
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From: Thomas Fjellstrom <hidden> Date: 2012-02-01 14:03:19
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, Simon McNair wrote:
Hi Thomas,
I've been trying to get an answer to this same question (I have a
supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 too). See my post at
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/30/107 .
My only suggestion is to get a kernel that's pre 2.6.30 (my Thecus
5200 marvell based unit is on 2.6.13 and it seems okay). If the data
is mission critical I certainly wouldn't be using the latest kernels
in production until it had 6+months in a stress test environment (of
course I'm an obsessive apt-get upgrade which makes me a hypocrite
:-P).
I can see from searching lkml.org for mvsas that there is a lot of
code going in to this driver and unless your're a linux guru and can
fix these problems I can only suggest you keep anything important on a
=< 2.6.13 kernel and monitor the situation.
Oh, and keep back ups ;-) (again here's me being the hypocrite).
That's my plan :-(
The older drivers were even worse, they'd have these really nasty pauses, or
just outright OOPS the entire machine.
That said, I've finally had it with the lack of support. It's been over two
years since I got the card, and enough is enough. I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just have to
wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
Simon
On 13 January 2012 18:44, Thomas Fjellstrom [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
Is there chance this driver will ever be stable? After more than two
years I'm starting to get extremely frustrated. I don't really have the
option at the moment to get a new card, otherwise I would, likely a non
marvell based device.
It actually managed to last 10 days this time though. Which is a record.
The interesting thing is there are no warnings or errors in dmesg coming
from the mvsas driver or scsi code. All that's happened is processes
lock up when trying to write. Reading seems to be fine.
Just to refresh everyone's memory, it's a AOC-SASLP-MV8 card, has a
MV64460/64461/64462 chipset. And I have 7 (seagate 7200.12 SATA drives
hooked up).
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
thomas@fjellstrom.ca
--
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the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
From: Thomas Fjellstrom <hidden> Date: 2012-02-01 14:42:28
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
On 01/02/2012 14:03, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
[...]
quoted
I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just have
to wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
When you find out, please let me know - I bought one via ebay, its
firmware was elderly and wouldn't let me put it in JBOD mode, after a
bit of googling I flashed it with IBM's latest firmware, then GRUB
thought my machine had no RAM in it. The card has been sitting in a box
since.
Yeah, GRUB immediately throws an "out of memory. Aborted" error, its annoying,
but I reported the issue on GRUB's bug tracker after talking to a guy in #grub
on freenode. Hopefully someone looks at it soon. It appears it happens so
early in grub's startup that it can't even output any debug info (I was asked
to run: `grub-install --debug-image=all /dev/sdX`, and did so, I get debug
output when the card is not installed, but absolutely nothing when it is
installed.
From: John Robinson <hidden> Date: 2012-02-01 14:54:42
On 01/02/2012 14:03, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
[...]
I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just have to
wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
When you find out, please let me know - I bought one via ebay, its
firmware was elderly and wouldn't let me put it in JBOD mode, after a
bit of googling I flashed it with IBM's latest firmware, then GRUB
thought my machine had no RAM in it. The card has been sitting in a box
since.
Cheers,
John.
From: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de> Date: 2012-02-01 15:17:01
On 02/01/2012 03:42 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
quoted
On 01/02/2012 14:03, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
[...]
quoted
I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just have
to wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
When you find out, please let me know - I bought one via ebay, its
firmware was elderly and wouldn't let me put it in JBOD mode, after a
bit of googling I flashed it with IBM's latest firmware, then GRUB
thought my machine had no RAM in it. The card has been sitting in a box
since.
Yeah, GRUB immediately throws an "out of memory. Aborted" error, its annoying,
but I reported the issue on GRUB's bug tracker after talking to a guy in #grub
on freenode. Hopefully someone looks at it soon. It appears it happens so
early in grub's startup that it can't even output any debug info (I was asked
to run: `grub-install --debug-image=all /dev/sdX`, and did so, I get debug
output when the card is not installed, but absolutely nothing when it is
installed.
From my experience the BIOS wouldn't present any disks in JBOD mode.
So you'd be needing to switch to RAID mode first.
Cheers,
Hannes
--
Dr. Hannes Reinecke zSeries & Storage
hare@suse.de +49 911 74053 688
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg
GF: J. Hawn, J. Guild, F. Imendörffer, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
From: Thomas Fjellstrom <hidden> Date: 2012-02-01 15:22:20
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
On 02/01/2012 03:42 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
quoted
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
quoted
On 01/02/2012 14:03, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
[...]
quoted
I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just
have to wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
When you find out, please let me know - I bought one via ebay, its
firmware was elderly and wouldn't let me put it in JBOD mode, after a
bit of googling I flashed it with IBM's latest firmware, then GRUB
thought my machine had no RAM in it. The card has been sitting in a box
since.
Yeah, GRUB immediately throws an "out of memory. Aborted" error, its
annoying, but I reported the issue on GRUB's bug tracker after talking
to a guy in #grub on freenode. Hopefully someone looks at it soon. It
appears it happens so early in grub's startup that it can't even output
any debug info (I was asked to run: `grub-install --debug-image=all
/dev/sdX`, and did so, I get debug output when the card is not
installed, but absolutely nothing when it is installed.
From my experience the BIOS wouldn't present any disks in JBOD mode.
So you'd be needing to switch to RAID mode first.
It does seem to notice them all in its own bios, and list them in JBOD mode.
But the disks aren't used for booting, so at the very least it shouldn't affect
booting at all. But I'll try that out anyhow to see if it "fixes" GRUB.
From: John Robinson <hidden> Date: 2012-02-01 15:27:32
On 01/02/2012 15:16, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
On 02/01/2012 03:42 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
quoted
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
quoted
On 01/02/2012 14:03, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
[...]
quoted
I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just have
to wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
When you find out, please let me know - I bought one via ebay, its
firmware was elderly and wouldn't let me put it in JBOD mode, after a
bit of googling I flashed it with IBM's latest firmware, then GRUB
thought my machine had no RAM in it.
[...]
From my experience the BIOS wouldn't present any disks in JBOD mode.
So you'd be needing to switch to RAID mode first.
The firmware my card came with didn't have a JBOD mode, which is why I
flashed the newer firmware. Then I could boot in JBOD mode from a rescue
CD and see some drives, though not those that had had RAID-mode metadata
written to them, but I couldn't boot the system with GRUB (from drives
on another controller).
Cheers,
John.
Yeah, GRUB immediately throws an "out of memory. Aborted" error, its annoying,
but I reported the issue on GRUB's bug tracker after talking to a guy in #grub
on freenode. Hopefully someone looks at it soon. It appears it happens so
early in grub's startup that it can't even output any debug info (I was asked
to run: `grub-install --debug-image=all /dev/sdX`, and did so, I get debug
output when the card is not installed, but absolutely nothing when it is
installed.
Just another data point. I've seen this issue also. It does not appear to be GRUB's fault. It
appears the BIOS on the card does something funky as it also prevents syslinux/isolinux/pxelinux and
its friends from properly detecting/reporting the machines memory. Machine has 16GB but a PXE boot
believes it has 3GB.
I "worked around" the problem by swapping out the mainboard for a later model with a different BIOS
and the problem went away. Not pretty, but it was the only way I could get the machine to boot with
those cards in it. I have 4 IBM cards in 2 machines and they work fine here. I still have the dodgy
mainboard and can set it up if you need help testing/reproducing the issue.
Regards,
Brad
From: Thomas Fjellstrom <hidden> Date: 2012-02-02 04:04:32
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, Brad Campbell wrote:
On 01/02/12 22:42, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
quoted
Yeah, GRUB immediately throws an "out of memory. Aborted" error, its
annoying, but I reported the issue on GRUB's bug tracker after talking
to a guy in #grub on freenode. Hopefully someone looks at it soon. It
appears it happens so early in grub's startup that it can't even output
any debug info (I was asked to run: `grub-install --debug-image=all
/dev/sdX`, and did so, I get debug output when the card is not
installed, but absolutely nothing when it is installed.
Just another data point. I've seen this issue also. It does not appear to
be GRUB's fault. It appears the BIOS on the card does something funky as
it also prevents syslinux/isolinux/pxelinux and its friends from properly
detecting/reporting the machines memory. Machine has 16GB but a PXE boot
believes it has 3GB.
I "worked around" the problem by swapping out the mainboard for a later
model with a different BIOS and the problem went away. Not pretty, but it
was the only way I could get the machine to boot with those cards in it. I
have 4 IBM cards in 2 machines and they work fine here. I still have the
dodgy mainboard and can set it up if you need help testing/reproducing the
issue.
I meant to do some testing on it tonight, but that doesn't seem like its going
to happen. Basically I'm going to try that grub change and see if it helps, if
you have the time, and desire to help, that would be nice, but I'm most likely
going to try it out tomorrow sometime regardless.
From: John Robinson <hidden> Date: 2012-02-26 12:56:47
On 01/02/2012 14:38, John Robinson wrote:
On 01/02/2012 14:03, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
[...]
quoted
I picked up a refurb IBM
ServeRaid M1015 (aka: LSI 9220-8i) card. It arrived yesterday. Just
have to
wait and see why grub doesn't like it.
When you find out, please let me know - I bought one via ebay, its
firmware was elderly and wouldn't let me put it in JBOD mode, after a
bit of googling I flashed it with IBM's latest firmware, then GRUB
thought my machine had no RAM in it. The card has been sitting in a box
since.
RHEL/CentOS 5's GRUB is buggy, in that it doesn't always read the whole
of the BIOS's memory map. See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=445893 and in particular
comment 7 where there's a link to a replacement GRUB which incorporates
the patch that was first offered to Red Hat in July 2007. The issue
likely affects other distros GRUBs too, since GRUB is moribund.
Cheers,
John.