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 <[email protected]> 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
> [email protected]
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
> the body of a message to [email protected]
> More majordomo info at ?http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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 <[email protected]> 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
> > [email protected]
> > --
> > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
> > the body of a message to [email protected]
> > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
[email protected]
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
> 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.
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.
> Cheers,
>
> John.
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
[email protected]
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.
On 02/01/2012 03:42 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
> On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
>> 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.
>
> 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
[email protected] +49 911 74053 688
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 N?rnberg
GF: J. Hawn, J. Guild, F. Imend?rffer, HRB 16746 (AG N?rnberg)
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> On 02/01/2012 03:42 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
> > On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > 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.
> Cheers,
>
> Hannes
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
[email protected]
On 01/02/2012 15:16, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> On 02/01/2012 03:42 PM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
>> On Wed Feb 1, 2012, John Robinson wrote:
>>> 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.
[...]
>
> 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.
On 01/02/12 22:42, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
>
> 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
On Wed Feb 1, 2012, Brad Campbell wrote:
> On 01/02/12 22:42, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:
> > 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.
> Regards,
> Brad
--
Thomas Fjellstrom
[email protected]
On 01/02/2012 14:38, John Robinson wrote:
> 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.
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.