On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 at 3:05pm, Seth Bardash wrote
Centos 4.0 has the driver built in.
We recommend you install 4.0 and then build the latest (9.2) driver and firmware from source (you must set up your kernel source tree to match the running kernel).
Build it with the firmware in the driver so that at the next boot it will upgrade the firmware. See 3ware's web site on how to do this. We will be adding a page that describes this in detail in the future.
Once built, you need to copy it to the appropriate /lib/modules/kernel_version/kernel/drivers/scsi directory.
Then run mkinitrd to create a new initrd image. Name it something else that is NOT the default.
edit grub.conf and add a copy of the existing boot entry but change the initrd image entry to match the new image created above.
Reboot and test it to make sure it works fine. If it does then save the old image as file.old and name the new one the same name as the original old one. Then delete the grub.conf entry you made for testing and you will be good to go.
After you have all this running then install the latest version of 3dm2 from 3ware's site.
All good advice, except for the fact that upgrading my daul 9500-12 system from the 9.1.5.2 codebase/stock centos-4 driver to the 9.2 codebase (including driver) utterly killed the performance. The 9500s are set up as RAID5 w/ a hot spare, and I do a software RAID0 stripe across them. These are tiobench numbers before "upgrading" (units are MB/s):
Read, 1 thread: 428.8 Read, 2 thread: 586.7 Read, 4 thread: 541.5 Read, 8 thread: 462.9
Write, 1 thread: 151.7 Write, 2 thread: 156.8 Write, 4 thread: 148.6 Write, 8 thread: 148.5
And after:
Read, 1 thread: 433.4 Read, 2 thread: 608.1 Read, 4 thread: 508.6 Read, 8 thread: 398.6
Write, 1 thread: 33.7 Write, 2 thread: 31.6 Write, 4 thread: 31.4 Write, 8 thread: 30.5
The bonnie++ results look even worse:
"Old" codeset: Read: 340.6 Write: 173.5
"New" codeset: Read: 134.5 Write: 35.6
I've got a request into 3ware for support, but no response yet.