Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 15:34:58 +0100 (CET) From: Frantisek Rysanek <Frantisek.Rysanek@pragonet.cz> To: stable@freebsd.org Cc: scott_long@btc.adaptec.com Subject: bug/misbehavior report - Adaptec ASR2120 (aac/aacp) under 4.8-pre-release1 Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0302211531350.1840-100000@rysanekf2.pragonet.cz>
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Dear gentlemen,
I'd like to report my experience with the Adaptec ASR2120 RAID controller.
Summary
=======
OS Version: 4.8-PRE1 (from current.freebsd.org, FEB.20th) vs. 4.7
Hardware device: Adaptec ASR2120 - U320 SCSI RAID controller
Driver: aac (device aac and aacp)
Problem: until 4.7, the aac driver didn't work with the ASR2120
(due to the ASR2120 being slightly different than
previous aac chips - something with DMA addressing)
in 4.8-PRE1, the installer kernel works fine, but the
GENERIC kernel installed on the RAID volume doesn't
boot due to a quirk between aac/aacp devices.
Suggested correction: disable device aacp in the installer and GENERIC
kernels. Either for the whole aac driver in general,
or as a QUIRK option specific to ASR2120 - or
disable the initial bus reset done by aacp, that
might just make it.
Our current workaround: we had a 5.0 installed on a stand-alone disk - we
booted 5.0, mounted the RAID volume with 4.8-PRE1
installed, copied the installer kernel from the
installer floppy, booted that, built a custom
4.8-PRE1 kernel with aacp commented out. It's
been working ever since.
More information: the aacp (pass through device) seems to send a bus
reset to the "RAID-private" bus, apart from messing with the individual
devices. The RAID controller detects the reset in the first place and the
RAID operation gets disrupted for a while, probably due to the disk drives
recovering from the reset. This temporary disruption is enough to prevent
the kernel from booting off the aac device - it says stuff like "SCSI
command timed out".
The same happens with 5.0 too, only it usually manages to boot - unless
the RAID's performance is further hampered e.g. by a background RAID
volume rebuild during boot. Took me a while to find this out.
In case this is a design decision: does anyone need RAID pass-through in
the installer? Is anyone still using SCSI CD-ROM/floppy drive, having only
the RAID controller available, therefore forced to attempt the
pass-through? Most machines I know nowadays are equipped with a legacy
floppy controller and an IDE CD-ROM drive.
I can imagine that, OTOH, quite a number of people would like to install
FreeBSD on a RAID drive and boot off that drive - right away, without
cumbersome workarounds to get the damn thing to work.
As far as I understand, the ASR2120 supports a SCSI CD-ROM as
a direct-access device out of the box.
I'm eagerly awaiting 4.8-RELEASE with a hope of getting the ASR2120 RAID
to work under FreeBSD 4.x. The behavior of 4.8-PRE1 urges me to notify you
of this partial misbehavior while there's some time to tweak it.
Thanks for the great job you're doing.
Frank Rysanek
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