Hello.  Following up on my own post I realized after I wrote the last
message that I had it completely backward and all is well in the ld driver.
In fact, Andrew is completely correct that the 3ware card is losing
interrupts and failing to acknowledge requests to the higher level drivers.
Whether this is due to having interrupts blocked at the time they come in,
or if the card is just going to sleep, I can't tell.  In any case, I wrote
a watchdog routine (twe_watchdog) which is setup to yank on the card if it
hasn't acknowledged a request in 5 seconds.  I've installed a kernel with
this change on our machine, and it immediately works better thanit's worked
in the last three weeks.  We'll beat on this a bit, and, if all goes well,
we'll ask about getting it pulled into the main source tree.  Whois the
best person to do that for us?
-thanks
-Brian