Odd incident with ZFS and an Aerca 1880i

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 08:37:20PM -0600, Dennis Glatting wrote:
> I have a Aerca 1880i plugged into a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 running
> RELENG_8 with a 10 2TB RAIDz pool with a OCZ Revo L2Arc and a SSD
> ZIL, among other volumes. The last scrub indicated there was an
> error with the pool and today I finally got around to cleaning
> things up.
> 
> During the scrub I initiated today, a running "zpool status"
> displayed a message that said I should clear the pool, which I did,
> while the scrub was running, which probably wasn't such a good idea.
> The result was my disks through the Aerca disappeared. On a power
> switch reboot the Aerca no longer displayed its boot-time messages
> and it appears the Aerca's firmware is kaput.
> 
> Specifically, during the boot sequence the following:
> 
> "arcmsr0: timed out waiting for firmware ready"
> "arcmsr0: wait 'get adapter firmware miscellaneous data' timeout"

1) The controller brand/vendor is Areca, not Aerca.  (This isn't just a
typo, you said it 3 times in your mail (including Subject).  :-) )

2) The arcmsr(4) man page does not mention the 1880i controller being
supported.  Readers should note this controller is ***super*** new.
It's a SATA600/SAS controller with PCIe 2.0:
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/1880.htm

My point:I am not surprised this is not working in RELENG_8.  This
controller, again, is **very** new on the market.

3) Areca provides FreeBSD support natively.  You should absolutely Email
them and bring the problem up with them via a support ticket.  They have
a good track record when it comes to support for FreeBSD in general.
You are absolutely going to need to mail them for such a new controller.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, US |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP 4BD6C0CB |