On Thursday 30 March 2006 11:10, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 11:02:43AM -0800, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> > >I'm using LSI MegaRAID SATA 150-4 on two systems.  One of my
> > > servers has 8 400GB SATA drives on two of these controllers in
> > > RAID-5 configuration. I'm quite pleased with the controller.
> > >
> > >LSI has some newer devices for which support was very recently
> > > added to CURRENT; I have no experience with them.
[...]
> Tested on an LSI MegaRAID SATA 300-8x, which confirms private advice
> that after PCI-IDs to our amr(4) driver, the newer LSI MegaRAID cards
> will Just Work
>
> The Linux megaraid2 driver accepts various Intel cards with the same
> pci-device IDs as the LSI MegaRAID cards, treating them exaclty as
> the above-listed LSI cards. Rework our amr(4) driver to also match
> and attach those device-ID if seen with an Intel vendor-ID. Add the
> Intel-vendor PCI decice-ids to pcidevs, so that PCI_VERBOSE will
> correctly identify the Intel cards.
>
> Update src/share/man/man4/amr.4 to list the newly-supported cards.
> (NB: I don't have the LSI SCSI or any Intel cards to test, just the
> LSI SATA, which works fine for me.)

I have a Tyan Thunder K8W 2885 w/ 8GB RAM and an LSI MegaRAID 300-8X. 
The MB is populated with two Opteron 246's.

What kind of read speeds do you folks see with your 300-8Xs? I can't 
seem to pull in more than about 150MB/sec with a full complement of 8 
250GB SATA2 drives in one big giant RAID0 configuration. I took Thor's 
(I think it was Thor's) advice and tuned down the memory to 333MHz 
instead of the full 400 since it's a full 8GB, but still.. no 
improvement. The program I'm testing is bonnie++, and I use:

bonnie++ -s 9000

... to negate the massive amount of RAM that ends up caching large 
chunks of the dataset.

LSI firmware: 8.14b, and motherboard firmware is also updated as of this 
week. I'm running NetBSD 3.99.16 (amd64) on the machine.

Do you have any advice for a pro-NetBSD guy like me to get the most 
speed out of this thing? Write speed is less an issue than read.

Side note: on this machine, the only OS I have no problems installing is 
NetBSD. I've got FreeBSD, various flavours of Linux (CentOS, etc) that 
I crammed in there, and the one that gave me the fewest issues was 
always NetBSD. That's pretty impressive, to me.

P.S. Is there a management utility that I can use on NetBSD? I'd prefer 
that over rebooting to BIOS to reconfigure the drives and the card when 
I need to. Turning on and off NCQ handling, for example, would be very 
nice.