anyone successfully using an icp-vortex / iir controller?

[Scott Long]

V. T. Mueller wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Scott Long schrieb:
> 
>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 02:13:56AM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>>>
>>>> I run an IIR controller on one of our servers just fine ... 4GB of 
>>>> RAM, FreeBSD 4.x ... haven't tried 6.x on it yet ...
>>>
>>> It's known to be broken on any system with >4GB of RAM.
>>
>> I'll strengthen that statement and say that it is completely, 100% 
>> unusable with 4GB of RAM or more.  You are guaranteed to get data 
>> corruption on the second I/O that you send.  Fixing this requires
>> re-writing much of the driver, unfortunately.
> 
> 
> If this is true - and I think so, I wasted a lot of time on it already - 
> so why isn't there a little piece of documentation speaking out a 
> warning. We've been happily using a large number of GDT controllers 
> under FreeBSD for years after we have had a couple of bad experiences 
> with other brands.
> 
> One of those, a mylex 160lp was just tested to be unfunctional with 
> 6.1b2 (8GB RAM), too.
> 
> Are there any *good* SCSI RAID controllers out there that are known to 
> be working in server setups (amd64, SMP, >4GB RAM)?
> 
> When thinking it over, I guess I have to be grateful that over many 
> years I never experienced s/th that made me question the "The Power To 
> Serve" slogan. What I really feel unhappy about right now is that there 
> was no information available so I could take appropriate measures in 
> order to avoid the current situation (at least none that I could find).
> 
> Well, what's the plan regarding the iir driver now? I would suspect that 
> letting folks rendering their servers unfunctional by upgrading memory 
> is not really a good strategy.
> 
> The manpage lists two authors/maintainers, I emailed both early this 
> week. Achim Leubner will be back from vacation the 27th. So maybe he can 
> contribute s/th constructive.
> 
> Kind regards,
> vt

Well, there are several ways that I can answer these questions.  I could 
say that the iir driver was developed and supported by the vendor, and 
that you should contact the vendor for support questions like this.  I
could say that the author of this driver didn't understand how to use 
FreeBSD's driver API's, and that to a casual reviewer, the driver looks
like it should work, and that only with a deeper look do the problems
become apparent.  I could say that while I personally support the vast
majority of the RAID drivers in FreeBSD, I only have the time and 
resources to actively maintain and fix the most popular ones, as taking 
care of a single driver for a single architecture usually involves an 
engineering and testing staff of at least a dozen people at most 
companies, and I try to do the equivalent job for 8 different drivers, 
all in my 'free time'.

So, I understand your frustration over this.  There are a number of
other RAID solutions that work quite well in FreeBSD.  Adaptec AAC,
LSI MegaRAID, IBM/Adaptec ServeRAID, Compaq/HP CISS all are very
reliable choices for SCSI RAID.  I know that that doesn't help you
with your ICP/Vortex choice, and I do sympathize with your problem.
I've done my best to modernize as many drivers as I can to work with
 >4GB, but I've had to prioritize my efforts based on the popularity and
the future returns of a given architecture.  ICP/Vortex basically died
when Adaptec bought them, so there isn't a lot of motivation to put
energy into the driver since there won't ever be any new cards from
them.  However, if someone is interested in fixing this driver, I can
help guide them.

Scott