Hello all,

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).

My question ... is anyone aware of the *real* status of these drivers? The Internet is full of somewhat conflicting reports. I'm referring to 'mvsas' and 'sata-mv', both of which seem to have issues under heavy load. It sure would be nice to return to using what appear to be well-made controller cards. I understand that even Alan Cox has expressed some frustration with the current driver status.

FWIW, I had similar problems under the RHEL-6 evaluation OS too.

Chuck