aic7xxx / AHA2940 worries... anyone?

[Daniel M. Eischen]

Edward Welbon wrote:
> 
> > How's your SCSI bus laid out (what devices on what cables, where is
> > termination, etc) and what options do you have enabled in the driver?
> 
> I carefully read and followed the recomendations of the SCSI3 spec for
> cabling and termination.  My cables are not over 1.5 meters, I have no
> very short segments between the connectors.  I terminate at the end of the
> chain with the drives builtin terminators.  I also explicitly set the
> termination in the 2940UW.  I also have tried other known good (and high
> dollar) cables and have gotten the same results as my common sense
> inexpensive cables.  It ain't my cables.
> 
> As for my setup, I have three adapters (Asus PCI-sc875 is the adapter du
> jour) and each adapter has three IBM DORS32160UW drives.  I have
> configured all nine disks as a raid0 (several partitions).  Using initial
> ram disk support, I mount my root file system on this raid0.
> 
> Here is my mdadd and mdrun.
> 
> /sbin/mdadd /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sde2 /dev/sdh2 \
>                      /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdf2 /dev/sdi2 \
>                      /dev/sdd2 /dev/sdg2 /dev/sdj2
> /sbin/mdrun -p0 -c64k /dev/md0
> 
> With the BusLogic BT-958 and the Asus CPI-SC875, I have no problems;  so
> far I have run over 128 consecutive passes of Bonnie on files of 1GB or
> larger on both adapters and no problems.  I have really pounded the Hades
> out of my disks with the BT-958, I have not tested the Asus quite so well
> but the 2940UWs die miserably within about 3 or fewer consecutive passes
> of bonnie on files of 2G size.  The Asus handles the 2G files with aplomb
> (though I have only done about 16 passes, it takes a while and I get bored
> easily).  Then the 2940 dies, a power cycle is required to restart.

We really need to see error messages from the failure.  Any in
the logs (from the latest driver, right?)?

> 
> Since two other adapters work perfectly, I am unconvinced that it is
> my cables or my disks.  Following are the non-commented configuration
> details for my scsi drivers, I included all that I have used (and build
> modules for) as a point of comparison.
> 
> CONFIG_SCSI_AHA1542=m
> 
> CONFIG_SCSI_AIC7XXX=m
> CONFIG_AIC7XXX_TAGGED_QUEUEING=y
> CONFIG_AIC7XXX_CMDS_PER_LUN=16

You should try lowering this to 8.  I have had no problems on my 
IBM DORS-32160W at 16 commands/lun, but it could be they have a
firmware bug under really heavy load.

> CONFIG_AIC7XXX_PAGE_ENABLE=y
> CONFIG_AIC7XXX_RESET_DELAY=15
> 
> CONFIG_SCSI_BUSLOGIC=m
> CONFIG_SCSI_OMIT_FLASHPOINT=y
> 
> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX=m
> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_TAGGED_QUEUE=y
> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_MAX_TAGS=12
> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_SYNC=20
> CONFIG_SCSI_NCR53C8XX_SYMBIOS_COMPAT=y
> 
> I boot from the 1542 scsi and have no IDE or other boot media whatsoever.
> Note that the scsi drivers above are all modules.  Interesting eh?
> 
> Uh, lets see, the system is an ORION/82450 based SuperMicro P6DOF
> dual Pentium Pro with the processors running at 80Mhz bus and 240
> processor.  The nine drives are IBM DORS32160UW's.  System memory
> is 128M.  The adaptec is tested with a 2.1.42 kernel, the others with
> a 2.1.48 kernel.  The same Bonnie binary was used for all (with the
> original 8Kbyte block reads).

You know that you're not getting the latest driver at 2.1.42?  You
need 2.1.48.