am2 MBs - 4g + SCSI wipes out root partition

[Adam McDougall]

Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:45:29PM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
>> On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:13:16 -0700
>> Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 11:30:57AM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:29:37 -0300
>>>> JoaoBR <joao at matik.com.br> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I tried MBs as Asus, Abit and Gigabyte all same result
>>>>>
>>>>> Same hardware with SATA works perfect
>>>>>
>>>>> Same hardware with scsi up to 3.5Gigs installed works perfect
>>>>>
>>>>> what calls my attention that all this MBs do not have the memroy hole 
>>>>> remapping feature so the complete 4gigs are available what normally was not 
>>>>> the case with amd64 Mbs for the Athlon 64 CPUs
>>>>>
>>>>> some has an opinion if this is a freebsd issue or MB falure or scsi drv 
>>>>> problem?
>>>>>
>>>> It's a driver problem.  If you want to use SCSI then you'll have to limit
>>>> memory to 3.5 GB.
>>> What you're saying is that Adaptec and LSI Logic SCSI controllers behave
>>> badly (and can cause data loss) on amd64 systems which contain more than
>>> 3.5GB of RAM.  This is a very big claim.
>>>
>>> Have you talked to Scott Long about this?
>>>
>>> Please expand on this, and provide evidence or references.  I need to
>>> document this in my Wiki if it is indeed true.
>>>
>> See the freebsd-scsi thread with Subject "data corruption with ahc driver
>> and 4GB of memory using a FBSD-8 64-bit installation?" from Wed, 30 Jan
>> 2008.
>>
>> This was for ahc, but the bit-rot which Scott mentions in his reply might
>> also apply to the LSI Logic controllers.
>>
>> Basically the driver doesn't correctly handle DMA above 4GB.  Since the PCI
>> hole gets mapped above 4GB it causes problems.  the (S)ATA drivers don't seem
>> to have this problem.
> 
> Thank you -- this is the exact information I was looking for.
> 
> I will update my Wiki page to reflect this quite major problem.
> 

I am using some LSI (mpt driver) ultra4 (U320 scsi) and LSI SAS 
controllers in FreeBSD 7.x amd64 with 20G of ram, and Adaptec (aac 
driver) with a 5th generation RAID card with 8G of ram, both have no 
such corruption problems.  Providing this as a counter-example just to 
document some evidence of which products seem to work fine.