mps(4) driver (LSI 6Gb SAS) commited to stable/8

[Kenneth D. Merry]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 01:08:41 +0300, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2011, Kenneth D. Merry wrote:
> 
> KDM> I just merged the mps(4) driver to stable/8, for those of you with LSI 6Gb
> KDM> SAS hardware.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Again, thank you very much Ken.  I'm planning to stress test this on 846 case 
> filled with 12 (yet) WD RE4 disks organized as raidz2, and will post the 
> results.
> 
> Any hints to particularly I/O stressing patterns?  Out of my mind, I'm planning 
> multiple parallel -j'ed builds, parallel tars, *SQL benchmarks -- what else 
> could you suppose?

The best stress test I have found has been to just do a single sequential
write stream with ZFS.  i.e.:

cd /path/to/zfs/pool
dd if=/dev/zero of=foo bs=1M

Just let it run for a long period of time and see what happens.

What model controller do you have, and what firmware do you have on it?

I have run into some bugs with the LSI 2.0 firmware, notably that you'll
get IOC Busy errors as well as some bogus invalid LBA errors with SATA
disks.  (I'm guessing it wouldn't happen with SAS disks.)  The 8.0 firmware
is better, but the version for the 9211-8i is not able to recognize large
numbers (more than 20) drives.  (I reported that to LSI and they supplied a
fix.)

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken at FreeBSD.ORG