[ On Thursday, February 28, 2002 16:05 Greg A. Woods wrote: ]

> I had understood the 1.5.2 ahc driver would work well enough with the
> AIC-7899, only with degraded performance (at least with U-160 drives).
> Your report suggests this is not correct and that even in 1.5.2 the
> AIC-7899 support is not good enough for production use with multiple
> U-160 targets even in degraded mode.

The AIC-7899 driver I am using is the 1.5.2 with the attach code fix
backported
from current and provided by Johnny Lam in the netbsd-help list. The driver
actually works "well" in my server and I haven't seen any particular problem
in the last few weeks of operation (running MySQL and Apache in very light
load). The problem I reported happened only when I  pulled one of the drive
from its hot-pluggable bay (both drives in RAID1 with RAIDFrame).

> I do know that the ahc driver in FreeBSD-4.4 is very stable and gets
> enormous and wonderful performance from the AIC-7899 with multiple
> Seagate Cheetah U-160 drives attached.  I've been running two machines
> identical to the above STL-2 but with four drives each (and more RAM) as
> squid servers under reasonably heavy daily load (up to 120 requests per
> second each) -- with squid running since the first week of Dec. and only
> restarted to upgrade it the other day.  I've been hoping this newer
> version of the driver would be re-ported to NetBSD soon, but I haven't
> heard anything about it in many months now.

Do we know if the FreeBSD version of the ahc driver would better
interact with RAIDFrame? Or is it not an interaction problem but simply
a driver flaw when handling drives disconnection?

Thanks,
Colin.