Re: 3Ware 9x00 controllers

On Wed, 27 Oct 2004, Pasi Pirhonen wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 11:10:11PM +0200, Remco Barendse wrote:
>> Just a small update on rthe 3Ware controller support:
>>
>> Moreover, just today they released a new driver+firmware for the 9x00
>> series, driver version 9.1.5.1 (was 9.0.2 before) sounds like a lot of
>> updates..... I'll try it tomorrow morning too.
>>
>
> Just to comment this part. I would not hurry too much with this
> updayte. My initial testing shows some 30% performance degration with
> this new driver + firmware. The driver actually is pretty much same as
> in 'trasferring linux scsi-layer request to the firmware and back', but
> there is this new (shouldn't this be available begining of summer?) BBU
> (Batter Backup Unit?) support for cache, so the ~100MB of your cache
> won't 'stay on it's way to the platter' when one does loose suddently
> power from the box :)

Oooooops! The card is already flashed but ok.

Some more news about the 3Ware build script. The script contains a minor 
bug, it expects the tarball with the driver to be called 3w-9xxx.tgz 
whereas the standard name of the tarball depends on the kernel version you 
are downloading it for (in this case 3w-9xxx2.4.tgz but ok.

The driver disk did build after renaming the file but doesn't work. It 
still complains about 'no appropriate driver'. Under water the installer 
claims to be loading 3w-9xxx but in fact it is not. Funny enough the 
install screen did show that installer tries to load 3w-xxxx even in 
expert mode and I didn't ask it too.

When I put the 3w-9xxx.bot driver on the disk and insmodded manually the installer finds 
the array. (I will probably get in trouble later when the 
installating is finished because the module may be missing but for now no worries)
I'm already happy I have a driver that will load at boot time :)

> Good thing is that one is able to boot back to the previous version of
> driver. The driver just flashes the old firmware in at boot.
>
> I am actually doing some numbers now with this old firmware to be
> compared to new one. I didn't do much 'logging' with this x86-64 box
> having 3w-9xxx and the ia32-box isn't available for testing anymore
> (there is almoust 800GB data already which i won't play with :).

Great, if you have the results let's both raise an issue at 
3ware about it, hopefully they'll improve the driver.

If the box boots after install I'll post some benchmarks of my array with 
4 raptors.

Cheers!
Remco

>
>
>
> --
> Pasi Pirhonen - [email protected] - http://iki.fi/upi/
>