Hi guys,

Thought I'd better let everyone know how I got on with my disk arrays.  :)

First of all, thanks *heaps* to everyone who offered advice and tried to 
help me with this.  I had fun experimenting and learning and I am now much 
better equiped to deal with any future problems with AoE.

What ended up happening was that I updated the BIOS on the RAID card I am 
using to see if anything would happen.  It was 10 builds (same version) 
newer than the one I was currently using.  I installed it successfully on 
both machines and went through all the procedures again to build a target 
AoE device.  I formatted it as ext3, (I was using ext2 before) and watched 
the disk IO from the target machine.

What should happen, but I start seeing write speeds like 60MB/sec and NO 
reads!  I was elated!

Then I wanted to know whay it was only 60MB/sec...  Went and looked at das 
lights enblink (excuse my bad German) and saw it was using the single 
spindle, which I tested earlier at the same speed natively.  So I threw 
together an LVM partition on a RAID10 device, and tested again.  Consistant 
speeds of about 140-150MB/sec, sustained!

I went back and found the release notes for the BIOS upgrade and it turned 
out to be a one-liner (well, three, bvut you get the point)... I quote:

*****
3. Enhancements and Bug Fixes:
==============================
- Fixed functionality issues with Supermicro SAS backplanes that are updated 
to "Boot 3" code
- Fixed SATA drive discovery issues with Intel SC5400 SAS backplanes
- Added support for Astek SAS backplanes
*****

I am indeed using a Supermicro case/backplane.

So this seems to be the problem I was looking for.  I can now get speeds in 
excess of 140MB/sec and have verified that when *writing* a filesystem, it's 
not spending all it's time *reading* the filesystem.  :)

I see there is another version of vblade out today, also.  Good work for 
getting it out, guys!  But does it solve the cache alignment error? 
(*ducks*)

Anyway, thanks again to everyone.  I have now officially entered the world 
of AoE!

Regards,
Phillip.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "maht" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "kelsey hudson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Phillip Bennett" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2008 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: [Aoetools-discuss] Introduction


> On Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:56:26 +0100, kelsey hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 
> wrote:
>>  I'll
>> forewarn you though: plan9 has horrible hardware support, largely
>> cause nobody uses it. Coraid was the first outside Bell Labs I've seen
>> at use it in production   Say Hi to Glenda for me.
>
> Your value of Nobody is a little low, you need to look a bit harder.
> But you're right; one has to match the hardware to Plan 9, not the other 
> way around (usually).
>
> I know we don't have "Plan 9 inside" stickers on stuff but we do exist in 
> the wild.
>
> Don't come to Glenda for raw speed on comparative hardware, you'll be 
> disappointed.
>
> However you might have enjoyed the Sydney Olympics where Plan 9 was used 
> to control the stadium lighting system
> It is also used in some Lucent Mobile phone masts with a hard RT kernel.
> And a few of us have our internet facing servers running Plan 9.
> Oh and IBM run it on one of their 64,000 CPU Blue Gene super-computing 
> systems, but mainly for research.
> It is from Coraid and IBM that some high bandwidth devices do have drivers 
> for fibre and whatnot.
>
> Plan 9's networked nature means you can serve a vblade from files on any 
> transport from remote machines, not just over TCP/IP.
>
> see you in irc://irc.freenode.org/#plan9 or on the mailing list : 
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> matt
>
> p.s. sorry if this is a dupe, I'm playing with Opera and it cheated on me
> 


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