On 03/04/2011 09:00 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:

On 3/3/11 6:52 PM, Chuck Munro wrote:

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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.

Since I have the luxury of time to evaluate options, I've just downloaded Scientific Linux 6 to see what happens with either the mvsas or sata-mv driver. This is my first experience with SL but I wanted native ext4 rather than the preview version in CentOS-Plus. Even if I stick with SL-6 as the KVM host, I'll continue using CentOS as guest machines. If the Marvell drivers don't pan out, it looks like I'll have to either spend money on a 3Ware|LSI|Promise controller or revert to CentOS-Plus 5.5 for ext4.

SL-6 is installing as I write this.

Chuck