Hi All,
I've just started caring for a dual Opteron machine. It has a 3Ware
9500S-12 RAID controller, a Tyan S2882G3NR motherboard, 10 IBM 400GB
disk drives, and a 650 watt power supply.
It has been behaving itself quite nicely until recently. The poor
behavior started when I upgraded the OS from CentOS 4.1 (32 bit) to
Centos 4.1 (x86_64). When running in uniprocessor mode, the system
appears to work properly. However, when running in SMP mode I get a lot
of SCSI disk errors in /var/log/messages. I've upgraded the 3w_9xxx
driver and firmware, but no joy (actually, I did get some joy out of
recompiling the kernel. Its been several years since I last compiled a
kernel and the process has changed for the better).
I've been in contact with 3Ware. From the error logs I supplied to
them, it looks like the issue is an insufficient power supply. Their
rule of thumb is 300W for the motherboard and 35 W for each disk drive.
That means that I would need (at a theoretical minimum) a 650 W power
supply - which I have.
I only notice the problem in SMP mode, not in uniprocessor mode. That
suggests to me that (1) I have a boarderline-sufficient power supply
that can support one but not two CPUs or (2) there is a problem with the
combination of Opteron/3Ware 9500S-12 hardware and the x86_64 SMP
kernel. I suppose there are even worse possibilities, but I'd rather
not think about those right now.
What do you think?
Does anyone have any experience with this sort of hardware on x86_64
kernels?
Does the 3w_9xxx driver work well on a x86_64 machine?
Does anyone have a suggestion as to what capacity power supply I should
have?
Thank you,
Evan
