Message-ID: <436CE571.5020801@wolfmountaingroup.com>
Date: Sat, 05 Nov 2005 10:01:37 -0700
From: "Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@wolfmountaingroup.com>
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To: Alex Bligh - linux-kernel <linux-kernel@alex.org.uk>
Cc: adam radford <aradford@gmail.com>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: 3ware 9550SX problems - mke2fs incredibly slow writing last third
 of inode tables
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Alex Bligh - linux-kernel wrote:

> Adam,
>
>>> All seems to go well until I try and do mke2fs. This appears to work,
>>> and tries to write the inode tables. However, at (about) 3400 inodes
>>> (of 11176), it slows to a crawl, writing one table every 10 seconds.
>>> strace shows it is still running, and no errors are being reported.
>>> However, it seems very sick.
>>
>>
>> Do you have cache turned on or off? If it's off, try turning it on.
>
>
> On. I started again (deleted the units etc.) which I'd done before.
> I am not sure quite what I did different this time. Now I get 270Mb/s
> on dbench, 100Mb/s (approx) on a solid contiguous write (dd), which
> is well into the field of uninspiring but not as daft as 7Mb/s. I had
> rather expected that h/w RAID 5 would give me faster reads, and only
> slightly degraded writes, compared to a single disk of the same type
> plugged into the motherboard SATA.
>
> However, dbench puts the (dual opteron 275) machine into 99% system
> state. Is that normal? Surely it should be in i/o wait.
>
> I /think/ what had happened is this: When I press F8 to exit the
> BIOS, it did not initialize the array (this is in accordance with the
> manual, it being deferred). Despite leaving the machine idle in the O/S
> for 2 days, it didn't start initializing the array. Running the mkfs
> started the initialization (would that make sense)? The second time
> I ran mkfs, I may have already (somehow) triggered it to start earlier.
>
> I shall try and work out some soak test I can run on it this w/e.


This is what I reported earlier and is the same behavior I am seeing on 
he 9500. I don't think its related
to the firmwae, but something in the driver because I can reproduce it 
on 8000 series controllers as well.
What's common between the two is it's on a 2.6.9 kernel with the 
drivers. Eventually, the init proceeds
and completes, but it's related to the INIT state not getting tripped 
into running.

Jeff

>
> -- 
> Alex Bligh
> -
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