Hello, I'm looking for some help to diagnose write stalls for sata
drives connected to Highpoint controllers running the mvsas driver.
I'm seeing writes stall for several seconds at a time for md raid arrays
using Highpoint 2740 and 2720sgl controllers running in JBOD mode (mvsas
driver). I'm seeing the same behavior on two servers that use the same
controllers but are otherwise configured differently.
Reads are just fine, the only time I encounter problems is when writing.
When writing large amounts of data, all of the drives in the array will
go idle (according to iostat) with all zeros in iostat except for
avgrq-sz (numbers < 10) and %util (always 100%). After a few seconds,
iostat will show resumed activity with the first report showing await
times for all drives roughly equal to the length of he stall. These
stalls will occur periodically during the write.
Here's iostat during a stall:
Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rMB/s wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await r_await w_await svctm %util
sdf 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.10
sdg 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
sdj 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 9.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
sdl 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
sdm 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
sdn 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.10
sdo 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 3.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.10
sdq 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.10
sdp 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 4.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00
Then, after a few seconds, the first iostat report after the stall with
non-zero activity:
sdf 0.00 0.00 0.00 3.00 0.00 0.01 5.67 1.03 3361.67 0.00 3361.67 175.67 52.70
sdg 0.00 0.00 0.00 3.00 0.00 0.01 5.67 1.01 3357.00 0.00 3357.00 171.33 51.40
sdj 0.00 0.00 1.00 9.00 0.00 0.22 46.50 4.61 3839.90 4.00 4266.11 55.30 55.30
sdl 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.00 0.00 0.01 12.50 0.54 2534.00 0.00 2534.00 269.50 53.90
sdm 0.00 0.00 0.00 4.00 0.00 0.01 4.25 1.01 2516.00 0.00 2516.00 126.75 50.70
sdn 0.00 0.00 0.00 3.00 0.00 0.12 83.00 1.02 1685.33 0.00 1685.33 175.33 52.60
sdo 0.00 0.00 0.00 4.00 0.00 0.02 10.25 1.60 3798.00 0.00 3798.00 149.00 59.60
sdq 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.00 0.00 0.06 64.50 0.53 1558.50 0.00 1558.50 266.50 53.30
sdp 0.00 0.00 0.00 5.00 0.00 0.02 9.80 2.11 4046.00 0.00 4046.00 120.80 60.40
There are no error messages printed to the console (serial console is
logged, plus checked dmesg and /var/log/messages).
The drives in the array show high ioerr_cnt values (0x330 aka 816d below).
[8:0:4:0] disk ATA ST8000DM002-1YW1 DN02 /dev/sdj
device_blocked=0
iocounterbits=32
iodone_cnt=0x147fa
ioerr_cnt=0x330
iorequest_cnt=0x1487a
queue_depth=31
queue_type=simple
scsi_level=6
state=running
timeout=30
type=0
SMART does not show any errors (no pending or relocated sectors, no UDMA
CRC errors, etc).
My guess is the write transfer to the drive is failing and is retried by
the driver. Since the start and end of the stall is the same for all of
the drives in the array I find it hard to believe the issue is related
to individual drives or cabling.
Ideas?
Are there any other sources of diagnostic data that would help to debug
this?
Kernel machine A: 4.13.5-100.fc25.x86_64
Kernel machine B: 4.13.10-200.fc26.x86_64
--Larkin
