Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:33:45 -0400 From: Tony Holmes <tony@crosswinds.net> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: 7.0/6.2, 4GB and AHC Message-ID: <20070718133345.GA82366@crosswinds.net>
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I had a very interesting couple of days trying to figure out why 6.2-STABLE and 7.0-CURRENT, both amd64, were giving me random hangs, panics etc. My system: Asus M2NPV-VM 4GB Ram 2 x Adaptec 19160 controllers 14 x 33GB Seagate 10k rpm scsi in a disk shelf (2 channel) 2 x 80GB Seagate SATA (geom mirror, system disks) I had the system installed with 6.2 and upgraded to 7.0- (for the new nfe driver for the onboard NIC) and added the Adaptecs and disk. I began to play with geom to set them up as a RAID 10 system for a database. Same configuration on FreeBSD, solaris and other systems resulted in blazing fast performance. Set up the disks, fired up a basic bonnie test and... chug chug and eventual random panic. Okay, maybe I messed up the geom config since I was tinkering around. Reboot, wait for sync to finish.... 20 hours later it was done - way too slow. Checked termination, cables, power, etc. All good. Fire up bonnie... first iteration showed approx 8MBps write approx 10MBps read was horrendous. Decided to attempt a fresh reinstall. Load up 6.2R amd64 cd - panic on startup just after SCSI probe delay. Tried once more and same thing. Okay, try 7.0 amd64. Divide by 0 error right after SCSI probe - and that's when the thought struck me - 4GB ram... Pulled out 2GB and viola, 7.0 installed easily. Configured the Raid 10 and got the nice 275MBps read and 150MBps (ballpark) benchmark numbers I was expecting. I know that amd64 supports 4gb+ (I have 2 others with SATA only that are running flawlessly). So I am attempting to determine the cause of the failures. The adaptecs are 32bit with older bios (2.57 and 3.10). They are in the 2 32bit pci slots of the M2NPV motherboard. I would have thought FreeBSD would have knocked a memory hole in the 3.5-4gb range to accomodate the device mappings. Does anyone have any explanations/pointers (I did search and attempt to RTFM with not much luck) about this? -- Tony Holmes Ph: (416) 993-1219 Founder and Senior Systems Architect Crosswinds Internet Communications Inc.
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