RE: PE 1650 with Perc 3/Di

Thank You Thank You Thank You ....

NMI_SECONDARY_ATU_ERROR is a catastrophic failure on the I960 internal
PCI bus. Being generically catastrophic, the Firmware `just stops' if no
corrective action is indicated.

External sources of this fault can be PCI bus reset, and *possibly* a
sizing request to the BARs (I know this is the primary side, but it
still causes a transfer error). Make sure you do not have any utilities
that are doing a pci trace of any form. Other PCI targets on the machine
could be faulty, triggering a PCI bus reset. Since the machine turns to
mud, you have no idea what else has been damaged, the Adapter is just
the highest activity source and thus feels the pain. You could have bad
memory (a stretch, I admit) for example ...

Internal sources can be internal hardware failure of Firmware bug.

Although Dell may have to make a determination if there is a hardware
problem on your machine, I feel that this *may* be a good machine to
analyze to see if there is a recoverable condition here. The Firmware
Engineer is probably going to have to instrument up to dump the entire
I960's PCI configuration register set at point of failure and print it
out the UART (a serial debug connector added to the adapter) to trace
this down. They may be able to just work on your Firmware if you are
willing ...

Please contact Dell Technical Support to make sure their cookbook does
not point to a bad motherboard or card on your system. If they find this
is pandemic and can be reproduced within Dell, or if not and endemic a
post-mortem on *your* machine is in order.

Sincerely -- Mark Salyzyn

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matt Soccio
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 2:12 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: PE 1650 with Perc 3/Di

I have a Poweredge 1650 with the Perc 3/Di raid controller, and have not
been able to keep it up an running for more than a week or so at a
time.  The mainboard was recently replaced on a pre-emptive basis for an
unrelated problem, but the problem existed before the replacement as
well.  After replacement, I updated all bios and esm firmware files that
were available on dell's website.

I was running a 2.4.22 kernel with the stock aacraid driver and it would
crash about every 8-12 days with errors like this:

Feb 29 18:43:55 phoenix kernel: aacraid:        NMI ISR:
NMI_SECONDARY_ATU_ERROR
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel: scsi: device set offline - command error
recover failed: host 0 channel 0 id 0 lun 0
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel: SCSI disk error : host 0 channel 0 id 0
lun 0 return code = 6000000
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:04, sector 15466552
Feb 29 18:47:13 phoenix kernel:  I/O error: dev 08:02, sector 3211272

Based on info on this list, I moved to a 2.4.25 kernel but kept the
2.4.22 aacraid driver.  It crashed the same way.

I have since got the latest (1.1.5) version of the driver from Adaptec's
site and it crashed in less than 48 hours with different errors, but I
could not grab them as it locked up harder than usual.

The errors flooding the console were about scsi hang? and scsi bus not
responding.

The really strange part of this is that I can't reproduce the problem,
it just happens randomly.  If I run bonnie++ for a couple hours with a
few gigs of I/O it chugs right along, but then it'll be sitting there
doing nothing the next day and just stop responding.  I just can't find
the trigger for the failure.

Is there any way to run linux with this hardware?  Is there some way to
bypass this hardware and run a software raid, or would I have to buy a
new scsi controller?  With the disk backplane the way it is in the
server, would I even be able to put a new controller in there?

Any suggestions or pointers are appreciated.

Matt

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