Data corruption with the mfi(4) driver

[Francois Tigeot]

Hi,

I have encountered catastrophic data corruption with LSI RAID adapters from
recent Dell servers (R720xd). The adapters apparently worked fine at first
but eventually destroyed the filesystems of volumes experiencing a high load.

I found out the hard way a Postgres database import was a sure way to
reproduce the problem.
Switching to the mrsas(4) driver made my test machine stable again; I have
yet to encounter a similar issue with it.

Now, this particular server was running under DragonFly and not FreeBSD but
the mfi(4) driver is mostly the same under both operating systems and I have
found reports of data corruption issues with mfi(4) and recent LSI adapters
in the archives of this list.

DragonFly will most likely switch to use mrsas(4) by default for at least the
LSI Thunderbolt serie of adapters to avoid data loss.

This mail from the mfi(4) and mrsas(4) maintainer contains more details,
including a partial list of impacted adapters:
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2014-July/128703.html

-- 
Francois Tigeot