Making, drinking tea and reading an opus magnum from Buzz Megg:
> Well, since I got bitten by this as well, I'll respond and hope that this
> puts the information into the archives.
>
> >Making, drinking tea and reading an opus magnum from david langhorst:
> > > There were a few msgs about this back in April.
> > >
> > > Problem: 3ware IDE RAID controller (Escalade 6800) degraded volume. One
> > > disk fails, controller BIOS only flags the volume to be rebuilt, openbsd
> > > twe driver does not contain the code to follow through. No time to hack
> > > kernel code.
>
> This isn't true. The OS driver doesn't rebuild the disk (at least not of
> RAID 0 or 1; I have no idea about RAID 5, I don't like it). The card takes
> care of that all by itself. The 6000 Series is Hardware RAID, not Software.
> 3ware no longer sells a software raid product. The trick is the fact that
> rebuilding a disk is *SLOW*.
>
> 80 Gigabytes / 33 MB/sec = approx 2000 secs (approx 30 minutes)
>
> It takes 30 minutes if all the disk is doing is rebuilding. Normally it is
> not just rebuilding. It is also booting the OS and continuing to run. A
> Deskstar 75GXP took about 4 hours to rebuild on my Escalade 6800. All the
> while my OpenBSD box was chugging along quite happily. If you don't believe
> me, look at the activity LED's on the card itself. There will be lots of
> activity between the two disks.

first of all you are risking here, if you read the bugs section:
never use the volume on the old firmware when it is rebuilding.
perhaps you've been lucky.
older (pre-7xxx) firmware does provie an option for a rebuild.
newer does not, os driver must initiate it.

> >again and for the last time.
> >3ware do not wish to release documentation to make full
> >functionality possible.
>
> And probably never really want to either. They make storage boxes which
> have *far* more markup that the IDE cards. The IDE cards are basically 5
> honking big XILINX FPGA's. Even in volume, those cards probably aren't
> cheap to make.
>
> To be fair, however, you probably want to make the appeal to the *Marketing*
> department rather than the technical department. You represent more work to
> the technical department. You represent *money* to the marketing
> department. Phrase your arguments as moving lots more Escalade cards to
> hobbyists who would never buy a Palisade storage box, but would love to have
> a development machine that rocks(an Escalade card running in Raid 0 on an
> Athlon takes *major* chunks of time off kernel and world compiles).

who needs a palisade box if you can use openbsd for that?
besides the palisade box is freebsd or a linux inside.
i see that to be a reason 3ware not realeasing the docs
now, thanks for your help and hint.

> This shows that A) they can make lots more money and B) that it won't kill
> off their main business cash cow. In this downturn, they may be more
> receptive than you would imagine.
>
> The number of people using the Escalade cards is pretty small. *You* need
> to help if you want to make it bigger.

in fact, a lot, and it would be much bigger if they'd release the
docs, which they dont.

> >want this working?
> >go do something about instead of whining and providing
> >ugly solutions for this problem.
>
> When my main server goes dead, I'll wave dead chickens over it and
> reconstruct it with toothpicks and duct tape if it gets it back online.

this does not look like you are interested in making
this card usable for all the ppl, i'm happy you
have and keep to maintain a good sense of humor.

> >the real solution is to get the docs and hack the driver,
> >so. go get the docs at least, i can do the rest.
> >
> >this is also to all the rest of whinies happy w/ booting
> >another os to fix their volumes.
>
> I find the above kind of condescending attitude far too common amongst the
> BSD community in general. While I share your frustration over closed source
> specifications, that kind of attitude does nothing to either solve the
> problem or to encourage the user to go solve the problem.

there is no frustration.
3ware promises things they never do. period.
what do we all do to liers? we forget about 'em.

> And, if supporting a driver is too annoying, I would suggest it should be
> removed. Do not lead people to believe that it is a production worthy
> driver when it is not.
>
> I got burned on this when I installed an Escalade card on OpenBSD, too.
> That's why that machine now runs FreeBSD.

oh, read the manual.
i have no problems supporting the driver to the extent of
functionality it's written based on the available information.
instead of reverse engineering the 3ware bloatware i'd better
hack on the drivers for which vendors provided the docs, more fun.

cu

-- 
    paranoic mickey       (my employers have changed but, the name has remained)

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