Storage server, hung tasks and tracebacks

[Brian Candler]

On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 07:50:00AM -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> > Any other suggestions (and of course interpretation of the kernel call
> > tracebacks) would be much appreciated.
> 
> Which mainboards are these Brian?  Make/model?

Tyan S5510, with Intel Xeon CPU E31225 @ 3.10GHz

Upgraded to BIOS 1.05a and iKVM 3.00

> Make/model/count of all add in cards?

1 x LSI SAS9201–16i
1 x LSI SAS92118–8i
1 x Intel X520-DA2 dual 10G NIC

although the 10G link wasn't being used for the most recent tests.

> Make/model of PSU?

Will have to check, I think it may be this one:
http://www.xcase.co.uk/XCASE-Power-Supply-p/psu-dolphin-900..htm

> Make model of chassis?

http://www.xcase.co.uk/24-bay-Hotswap-rackmount-chassis-norco-RPC-4224-p/case-xcase-rm424.htm

The drives are 24 x ST3000DM001 (I was hoping to get low-power Hitachi
drives but they weren't available at the time)

> I'll sleuth around and see what I can find.  Could be some obscure
> expansion card interaction.  Could be undersized PSUs or lack of
> backplanes spread evenly across the 12v rails of a multi-rail PSU, etc, etc.

Much appreciated.

However, last night I rebooted one box (the one which wouldn't let me ssh
in) then upgraded it to ubuntu 12.04.  It has been running a couple of
concurrent bonnie++ instances for over 24 hours without a hitch.

So maybe it's the mpt2sas driver which is the difference:

[dmesg from Ubuntu 11.10]
    mpt2sas version 08.100.00.02

[dmesg from Ubuntu 12.04]
    mpt2sas version 10.100.00.00

Regards,

Brian.