On Fri, 27 Jan 2006 at 10:03pm, David J. Mellor wrote
My setup is as follows:
Motherboard: Tyan S2895 CPU: Two Opteron 275s Memory: 4 GB Disk: Three 250 GB SATA drives attached to a 3Ware 9500S-4LP RAID card Video: Nvidia GeForce 7800
The only hardware that I have added to the motherboard is the 3Ware card and the Nvidia card. The disks are configured as a RAID 5 array, and the machine boots from this array. I installed CentOS 4.2 x86 on this system without any problems during the installation. The on-board sound card was recognised and the correct driver (snd_intel8x0) installed to handle it. However, on rebooting into the SMP kernel after the install, the installation proved to be completely unstable. The kernel would panic sometimes during startup and sometimes during shutdown. The uniprocessor kernel seemed to be stable, but I noticed the following error messages appearing on the console during startup (the same error messages also appeared when booting into the SMP kernel):
3w-9xxx: scsi0: ERROR: (0x03:0x0104): SGL entry has illegal length:address=0x37077000, length=0xFF, cmd=X.
Ignoring for the moment your real question, that's actually a harmless error message. Look at the 3ware knowledge base. The "fix" is to update your 3ware codeset (=firmware+driver) to the latest for the 9500, which you can do while still using the stock kernel.