SMP, the aac driver and command timeouts

[Gary Stanley]

I used to get this problem on our 2120's/2200 cards. After doing so much to 
try and fix the problem, my employers were forced to switch to other brands 
to get rid of the "command timeout" errors. We've tried various Ultra320 
SCSI drives (Maxtor, Seagate) and both of them had the same problem, after 
swapping cables/backplanes/machines the problem was traced to the cards 
(even with updated controller firmware, the problem was still there.) All 
machines were supermicro computers with 1 or 2 Xeons and 2GB of ram (some 
had 2GB, some had 4GB)

The only thing that really bothered me was FreeBSD seem to really dislike 
(or maybe the aac driver) being installed onto a RAID5 array that was 
building with many members (I would get panic's and command timeout errors 
during the boot after the install.. )

YMMV, tho.

At 12:10 AM 8/29/2003, you wrote:
>Hi there,
>
>I've just installed a fresh 4.8-RELEASE on a dual-Xeon (2.6GHz) with 4GB
>of RAM.
>
>I'm using the aac driver to support an Adaptec 2120S:
>
>aac0: <Adaptec SCSI RAID 2120S> mem 0xd0000000-0xd3ffffff irq 2 at
>       device 2.0 on pci4
>aac0: i960RX 100MHz, 48MB cache memory, optional battery present
>aac0: Kernel 4.0-0, Build 6003, S/N b7e76e
>
>When I try to boot an SMP kernel (with or without HTT enabled in the
>BIOS and kernel), the system fails to boot.
>
>On serial console, I see messages that look like this:
>
>aac0 ... COMMAND 0x...... TIMEOUT AFTER ... seconds
>
>I've googled around, and the advice I've seen is:
>
>1) Make sure your drives have enough power, and
>2) Flash up the firmware of your drives.
>
>I'll get the guys at our colo to flash the drive firmware and confirm
>that the PSU is a 350W, but I'm under serious time pressure and wanted
>to ask in advance whether this is likely to solve my problem, or whether
>there are other likely candidates I should investigate.
>
>On the plus side, this box as a FreeBSD installation is faring much
>better than it did as a Windows 2000 Advanced Server.  I couldn't even
>get Apache2 to start up more than 200 threads.  Try downgrading Windows
>2000 from multiprocessor to uniprocessor over serial console. ;-)
>
>TIA,
>Sheldon.
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