LSILogic MegaRAID and "camcontrol:cam_lookup_pass:CAMGETPASSTHRU ioctl failed"

[Gary Mulder]

 From personal experience the MegaRAID monitoring software has crashed 
two of our FreeBSD 4.9 systems, before we unistalled it.

As these systems age past two years drives are starting to fail and 
given that I can't monitor the state of the RAID arrays from FreeBSD I'm 
not purchasing any more MegaRAID controller based systems.

Furthermore, although I haven't been able to definitively isolate it, I 
suspect that some mysterious hangs on some of our more heavily loaded 
database systems are due to the MegaRAID controller not gracefully 
handling failed drives, even when hot spares are available.

I have zero diagnostic information as FreeBSD just stops responding (no 
console keyboard response, nothing...). I suspect this is due to the 
fact that my root partition is on the MegaRAID controller. This is also 
with the latest firmware installed on the MegaRAID controllers.

So, what are people's experiences with the Adaptec 2200S U320 controller 
under FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x?

Gary

Doug Ambrisko wrote:
> No they won't work since there is no Linux compatibility shim for the 
> ioctl's.  Also the MegaMonitor utilities leaks shared memory under 
> Linux and dies.  Fixes from LSI are slow to come by.
> 
> The updated version of the Linux tools do tend to work better.  Running the
> ancient FreeBSD MegaMonitor does bad things to your system.  It may
> work once or twice but can start breaking other programs on the system.
> 
> Doug A.