[CentOS] CentOS and Marvell SAS/SATA drivers

[Les Mikesell]

On 3/3/11 6:52 PM, Chuck Munro wrote:
>
> I've been on a real roller coaster ride getting a large virtual host up
> and running.  One troublesome thing I've discovered (the hard way) is
> that the drivers for Marvell SAS/SATA chips still have a few problems.
>
> After Googling around quite a bit, I see a significant number of others
> have had similar issues, especially evident in the Ubuntu forums but
> also for a few RHEL/CentOS users.
>
> I have found that under heavy load (in my case, simply doing the initial
> sync of large RAID-6 arrays) the current 0.8 driver can wander off into
> the weeds after a while, less so for the older 0.5 driver in CentOS-5.
> It would appear that some sort of bug has been introduced into the newer
> driver.
>
> I've had to replace the Marvell-based controllers with LSI, which seem
> rock solid.  I'm rather disappointed that I've wasted good money on
> several Marvell-based controller cards (2 SAS/SATA and 2 SATA).

I replaced separate SII and promise controllers with a single 8-port Marvell 
based card and thought it was a big improvement.  No problems with centos5.x, 
mostly running RAID1 pairs, one of which is frequently hot-swapped and 
re-synced.  I hope its not going to have problems when I upgrade.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com