mpt issue in ESX guest with pass-through scsi tape drive

Hey guys,

I don't know what mailing list I should post to, I think it has
something to do with the mpt driver.

I have a server (a PowerEdge T300) at home running ESXi 3.5.0
installable. I have some windows guests and some FreeBSD guests, and
they are all running great.

The server also has an Adaptec 29160N scsi card with an Exabyte VXA-2
tapedrive. I want to set up a FreeBSD guest, to run amanda, using the
tape drive.

I have set up one guest with a pass-through SCSI device, where the
tapedrive is passed to the guest. This works perfectly on Windows and
CentOS, but not on my beloved FreeBSD. (VMware emulates a LSILogic 1030
Ultra4 adapter, and presents that to the guest OS.)

I have tried 7.0/amd64, 6.2/amd64 and 6.2/i386, they all have exactly
the same behaviour.

If I look at the devices in FreeBSD, it only shows the disk:

hon-bak-01# camcontrol devlist
<VMware Virtual disk 1.0>          at scbus0 target 0 lun 0 (pass0,da0)

If I scan the scsi controller, I get the following result:

hon-bak-01# camcontrol rescan all
sa0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
sa0: <EXABYTE VXA-2 2152> Removable Sequential Access SCSI-2 device
sa0: 80.000MB/s transfers (40.000MHz, offset 127, 16bit)
(sa0:mpt0:0:1:0): lost device
(sa0:mpt0:0:1:0): removing device entry
Re-scan of bus 0 was successful

So there's something that triggers the 'lost device' message, but I have
no idea why.

Some more info about dmesg:

hon-bak-01# cat /var/run/dmesg.boot | grep mpt
mpt0: <LSILogic 1030 Ultra4 Adapter> port 0x1080-0x10ff mem
0xf4810000-0xf4810fff irq 17 at device 16.0 on pci0
mpt0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
mpt0: MPI Version=1.2.0.0
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
mpt0: <LSILogic 1030 Ultra4 Adapter> port 0x1080-0x10ff mem
0xf4810000-0xf4810fff irq 17 at device 16.0 on pci0
mpt0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
mpt0: MPI Version=1.2.0.0
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
sa0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
(sa0:mpt0:0:1:0): lost device
(sa0:mpt0:0:1:0): removing device entry
sa0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 1 lun 0
(sa0:mpt0:0:1:0): lost device
(sa0:mpt0:0:1:0): removing device entry
mpt0: <LSILogic 1030 Ultra4 Adapter> port 0x1080-0x10ff mem
0xf4810000-0xf4810fff irq 17 at device 16.0 on pci0
mpt0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
mpt0: MPI Version=1.2.0.0
da0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
hon-bak-01#


The funny thing is, if I reinstall that guest with CentOS5 for example,
it works fine. I can see the scsi device, I can manage tapes using mt,
and I can backup and restore using tar.

[root_at_hon-bak-01 ~]# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: VMware   Model: Virtual disk     Rev: 1.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
  Vendor: EXABYTE  Model: VXA-2            Rev: 2152
  Type:   Sequential-Access                ANSI SCSI revision: 02


So this leads me to believe it's an issue with the mpt driver in
FreeBSD. (Or a combination of the bsd driver and the emulated card by
vmware).

Does anyone know how I could use BSD to talk to the tapedrive? Does the
maintainer of the mpt driver read this list as well?


-- 


With kind regards,

Angelo Höngens
The Netherlands