Re: aac0: COMMAND 0xffffffffxxxxxxxx TIMEOUT AFTER xx SECONDS

Chris Hedley wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Jun 2006, Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:
> > On Jun 11, 2006, at 5:41 AM, Chris Hedley wrote:
> >> I'm starting to get the impression that the 2410SA's low end design is even 
> >> lower than its fairly low-end price would suggest.  Any suggestions for 
> >> similarly priced cards with better performance?  The best I can manage for
> >> slot type is 66x64 PCI unless I change my motherboard, which I can't quite
> >> afford to do at the moment...
> >
> > I have not done any performance testing but I have some LSI MegaRAID SATA-150 
> > 4 cards.  Maybe you can find some benchmark comparison reviews.  The Areca,
> > which is a bit more expensive, also gets good reviews.  I have a couple of 
> > them but for my Solaris 10 machines and they are just now being set up.  Both 
> > the LSI and Areca have FreeBSD drivers.
> 
> Must admit I'm tempted by an Areca, even with the high price tag.
> 
> I've been having a look at some reviews, but unfortunately few of them 
> make it clear whether or not the hard drives' cache is set to write back 
> or write through.  Needless to say, I'm not desperately enthusiastic about 
> combining a RAID controller with write back caching, but I suspect that a 
> lot of controllers are heavily dependent on it being enabled to attain 
> their performance: it seems that my 2410SA's rather dismal 3-6 & 30-40MB/s 
> respective RAID5 write & read speeds would increase dramatically were I to 
> use write-back, but I'm not going there...  I guess my point is that I 
> really don't want to find myself with another dog if I buy something with 
> apparently superior performance if it's completely reliant on on-disc 
> write back caching being enabled.

I'm guessing this is because this controller has no read cache and
no battery for it's write cache:

AAC0> conta sho cache 0
Executing: container show cache 0

Global Container Read Cache Size  : 0
Global Container Write Cache Size : 16203776

Read Cache Setting        : ENABLE
Write Cache Setting       : ENABLE WHEN PROTECTED
Write Cache Status        : Inactive, battery not present

If you're happy using the controller's write cache without battery
backup, you can turn it on quite easily:

container set cache /unprotected 0

> I'm really desperate to ditch the 2410SA controller: the performance, as 
> mentioned, is terrible, and it tends to lock up the entire system with 
> various timeouts if anything more than trivial read or write accesses are 
> attempted (not sure if this is the case with the latest -current as I've 
> been having too many problems with assorted panics with recent kernels to 
> test it fully).

I've not had any issues with these controllers on the latest -current,
although I'm not after performance.  I turn off the drive write
cache as well.  I like them mainly because I can do all the controller
and container configuration using the aaccli utility, and not be
forced to use the BIOS utility.

What do you mean by "anything more than trivial read or write accesses"?

When I tested these adaptors (ok it was still a simple test) I setup
the container with a hot spare ufs+softupdate.  I then started 5
or 6 parallell tar -xvf of the FreeBSD CVS repo.   After a few minutes
I pulled the SATA cable from one of the drives.  Ther tar -xvf
didn't even blink, the buzzer sounded, the "failed" disk was replaced
automatically and the controler started rebuilding.  It always
worked.  No matter how busy I tried to make the disks.

Ian

--
Ian Freislich