Problem with Power Edge 2650 and RH 3.0 ES

[Tadek]

> 	I've seen similar symptoms on 2550s and 2650s with the Adaptec based 
> raid controllers (Perc3/Di on the 2650).  Briefly what happens is the 
> controller takes way too long to respond to an operation (Erroneous 
> decision to flush the cache I'm told), all containers on the controller 
> are marked offline by the scsi subsystem in the kernel - if the logs 
> were visible (which they aren't because your writes will never finish) 
> you'd see the kernel complaining as it took each container offline (sda, 
> sdb, etc).  It ends up having no root partition, no swap, no log 
> partition, etc.  Almost nothing you test will work because it involves 
> reading something from the disk.  The kernel continues to respond to 
> pings, and likely if you had a simple daemon that didn't access the disk 
> running it would continue to work.
> 
> 	To work around this:   Firmware rev 3157 for the 2650 Perc3/Di is 
> supposed to mysteriously not suffer from this problem.  I say 
> mysteriously because apparently there are no changes between 3157 and 
> the more recent firmware that would have anything to do with this, but 
> the more recent firmware and older firmware revisions do demonstrate the 
> problem.
> 	I'll also send along a revision of the aacraid driver from some months 
> ago that still hasn't found its way through adaptec, dell or redhat 
> testing to my knowledge, that handles timeouts from the controller 
> without taking everything offline.  I'll attach in a direct email.  Some 
> compiling required.  May only work with 2.4 kernels.
> 
> Andrew
Hello,

We haven't PERC controller but we tried to reinstall driver for AIC
7899. We try to switch kernel versions and install third-party driver
(not included in kernel). Finally we try to
install DKMS and Dell driver but all this operations doesn't help.

-- 
Tadeusz Woch [tadek at epox.pl]

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