MFI driver issues

[Erich Weiler]

Greetings all,

I was recently having trouble with a Dell R610 server with a Perc H800 SAS controller, which had 2 12 disk MD1200's SAS chained together (so 24 disks total).  However, I get these hangs every once in a while to the tune of:

mfi0: COMMAND xxxxx Timeout After 60 seconds

And that repeats every 30 seconds.  I can 'fix' it by doing a:

mfiutil show volumes

Oddly enough.  It then 'unfreezes'.

BTW, I'm on 8.2-PRERELEASE, with the latest snapshot from March 1st, 2011.

Now, I was following this thread:

http://old.nabble.com/mps%284%29-driver-%28LSI-6Gb-SAS%29-commited-to-stable-8-td30960262.html

And it looks like I may be able to use the MPT driver instead of MFI to resolve my problem?  And it looks like it maybe was recently committed to 8-STABLE?  But I don't see MPT in this snapshot I'm on, so maybe I'm mistaken.  Anyone have any ideas?  

BTW, I have the latest firmware on the controller and have even tried another controller (same exact model) and the same lockup happens under heavy writes.

Thanks for any hints!!

-erich