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Subject: Dell 1850/PERC 4e/Si (Megaraid) with "too many retries" error
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I have a FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE server which is physically a Dell 1850
with a PERC 4e/Si (Megaraid) controller and 2 x 73 GB disk in a RAID 1
configuration:

amr0: <LSILogic MegaRAID 1.53> mem 0xf80f0000-0xf80fffff,0xfe9e0000-0xfe9fffff irq 46 at device 14.0 on pci2
amr0: [ITHREAD]
amr0: delete logical drives supported by controller
amr0: <LSILogic PERC 4e/Si> Firmware 521X, BIOS H430, 256MB RAM
...
amr0: delete logical drives supported by controller
amrd0: <LSILogic MegaRAID logical drive> on amr0
amrd0: 69880MB (143114240 sectors) RAID 1 (optimal)

Occasionally the Megaraid controller will report the followin to syslog:

May  6 19:59:07 dhcp2 kernel: amr0: Too many retries on command 0xc3d31738.  Controller is likely dead
May 21 11:58:58 dhcp2 kernel: amr0: Too many retries on command 0xc3d311b8.  Controller is likely dead
Jul 24 22:22:34 dhcp2 kernel: amr0: Too many retries on command 0xc3d2fa58.  Controller is likely dead
Aug  1 07:52:30 dhcp2 kernel: amr0: Too many retries on command 0xc3d31318.  Controller is likely dead

However, there are no apparent ill effects, and the machine just keeps
running with no other sign of problems.

My question is: Should I be worried about these error messages?

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no