Intel Matrixraid on amd64

[Gót András]

Hi,

I had this issue on an AMD64 FreeBSD installed machine. My problem was not
with the freebsd driver. I assume it was working as written (FreeBSD stuff
is quite well documented and working as documented). The real problem came
at the reboot. I'd suggest to go with gmirror which is a transparent
solution, so you can mount your drives separately also.

Imho, take a look at you config and if it's a transparent raid1 setup,
just migrate easily to gmirror. For a RAID1 config you won't get much more
speed with a real and relatively expensive raid card.

Yes, maybe I got paranoid after that hard weekend and also know that intel
stuff works much better than nvidia when came to chipsets and the like.
But I'd not give my data to a half-solution.

Andras



On Szo, December 26, 2009 6:40 pm, Benny Goemans wrote:
> Hi András,
>
>
> I am indeed aware of the risk that these kind of raid solutions bring
> with them and if I would do the whole system anew I would just buy a
> separate raid controller. The thing is that there's now around 1TB of data
> in a raid configuration since one or two years and I can't change raid
> controllers easily. This is especially hard since it's a tri boot system
> (windows, freebsd and a test-os).
>
>
> But I suppose that the driver is expected to work on amd64 just as it is
> on i386, isn't it? After all everything is showing up fine, it just seems
> to be that sysinstall has a problem using it (maybe the kernel but I'll do
> some more tests to confirm).
>
> Regards,
>
>
> Benny Goemans
>
>
> On Friday 25 December 2009 18:30:49 Gót András wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> I strongly advise against any of these "raid solutions". I got a very
>> rough weekend beacuse of the nvidia raid. Here's the short story.
>>
>> I got our new webserver with S939 Opteron and the matched nvidia
>> chipset. That time FreeBSD 6.1 was the actual, so that was installed.
>> When
>> installing I noticed that the motherboard raid works with FreeBSD so I
>> went with it. It turned out that it's completely transparent so I was
>> happy thinking that a simple solution is not likely to go wrong.
>>
>> On a weekend I went for the planned maintenance to the coloc facility.
>> When the reboot came the motherboard nvidia raid told me that I have a
>> failed Raid1 with one disk. The problem was that after this it refused
>> to boot anymore. Later it turned out that somewhy 2 weeks ago! the
>> nvidia raid dropped one disk and that left in that state (it was
>> mountable, readable quite well etc.) and the other had the actual data.
>>
>> Both disk was replaced then beacause I told myself that at least I'd
>> like to gain something out this huge downtime. Since then gmirror was
>> used and tried what it would do if I take out one this. Gmirror handled
>> it quite well, I got a message in the log about the disk failure and
>> everything went on. With the software raid the nvidia controller or the
>> disk backplane lost one disk after half a year of uptime but a reboot
>> corrected it. (There was a small thread about this that time on a
>> FreeBSD maillist.)
>>
>>
>> On Pén, December 25, 2009 12:14 pm, Benny Goemans wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm running 8.0-release (i386) on a Asus P5WDG2 motherboard with
>>> integrated Intel Matrixraid (software raid) controller. Everything
>>> runs fine in this one.
>>>
>>> Since I've noticed 64 bit support for the Nvidia driver I've been
>>> trying to install the AMD64 8.0 version. During install dmesg shows my
>>> hard drives and raid drives (ar0, ar1)  perfectly, just as it does in
>>> the i386 version. But when I enter sysinstall it can't locate my
>>> drive(s). It just doesn't find a single drive, no arN but also no hdaN
>>> (which do show up in
>>> dmesg).
>>>
>>> Has anyone seen this behaviour before and is there some kind of
>>> solution? Maybe some parameters to sysinstall, extra kernel modules to
>>> load that are on the install disk or something?
>>>
>>> Kind regards,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Benny Goemans
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ps. I'm currently redownloading the iso file for the cd and will
>>> check its checksum to make sure I don't have some bizarre bad download
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>>>
>>
>