[CentOS] Tyan Thunder K8SE S2892 Report

Joshua Baker-LePain jlb17 at duke.edu
Fri Jul 29 12:59:48 UTC 2005


On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 at 4:18pm, Bryan J. Smith wrote

> On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 13:30 -0700, Kirk Bocek wrote:

> > The 3Ware controller is pretty cool. As I said, the driver (3w-9xxx) is
> > included in the 2.6 kernel. 3Ware provides a simple CLI utility for
> > management. They also have a GUI tool but I didn't bother running it.
> > You can create, remove and verify 'units' on a running system. The
> > associated /dev entries are dynamically added and removed as you make
> > changes. Very nice.
> 
> Make sure you have the latest 3Ware driver and firmware for the 9500S
> series.  Also consider the "tweaks" on 3Ware's site.

Do *not* use the latest 3ware driver/firmware (i.e. the 9.2 codeset) if 
you have more than unit per controller.  There is a bad cache allocation 
bug in that codeset that kills performance if there is more than unit 
present on a controller when it boots.  And, yes, this holds even if the 
2nd unit is merely a hot spare.

Of course, the 9.2 codeset is the only one that properly handles BBUs, 
which presents a bit of a catch-22 if your controllers have 'em.  The 
current kludge^Wfix for that situation is to boot with the hot spare 
drives *physically* disconnected from the controller, plug them in after 
the system is up, and then go into 3dm2/tw_cli and add them as hot spares.

There's a beta of 9.2.1 on 3ware's site, but my only 9500 based system is 
in production now (using the above kludge), so I won't be testing it until 
after it's officially released.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University



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