Re: Dell RAID device support?

["Michael L. Hitch" <mhitch%lightning.msu.montana.edu@localhost>]

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Roger Pau Monné wrote:

> Forgot to say, but you can find more info about the SAS 6/iR RAID
> problems in this thread:
>
> http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2011/06/21/msg008461.html
>
> And it will be great if you can port a newer driver that has better
> support for this card.

  I don't have experience with the M610 blade, but I did look at the RAID 
performance on an M600 blade.

  The first problem is that the blade does not appear to have a 
battery-backed cache, and the write cache for any raid volumes is not 
enabled.  There's nothing in the BIOS setup to enable it, but there is a 
Linux program, lsiutil, available that can enable the write caching on the 
raid volumes.  That help the write performance considerably.  I booted a 
Knoppix live CD and used that to build the lsiutil program and run it.

  Another consideration which I have not been able to look into is that 
NetBSD will only send one command at a time to each drive if the drive 
does not indicate that tagged queueing is availble.  The message 
referenced above does not seem to indicate that tagged queueing is enabled 
for the drives, and that may also impact performance.  I've been waiting 
to get access to an M600 blade to test this, but it hasn't been available 
for me to play with yet.  I bring this up because I found that the 
Compaq/HP SmartArray controller had this issue, and once I fixed the 
driver to indicate that tagged queueing was available, performance with no 
write caching improved when used with softdep or wapbl mounts.

--
Michael L. Hitch                        mhitch%montana.edu@localhost
Computer Consultant
Information Technology Center
Montana State University        Bozeman, MT     USA