SGI: Hardware

Recently I acquired a 4-Gbit FC-AL storage enclosure (a Huge Systems/Ciprico MediaVault 4210, to be precise) and attached it to an LSI dual-port 4-Gbit FC (LSI7204XP-LC) HBA.

The disks, or rather the volumes, are recorded in the output of “hinv” and shown to be connected to the HBA channels. The array volume size is about ~1250 Gbytes per channel (and as such, as far as I recall, this shouldn't be even close to exceeding any IRIX XFS storage boundaries/limits). Furthermore, the volumes are set up with 512 bytes per block.

However, when I proceed with “fx” the trouble starts. First I get a weird, unspecified, ‘I/O error’ (same for both channels, which are independently supplied from the enclosure; two independent RAID-0 arrays, to be precise). After that, I can see things like volume sizes. Anyway, then (still in “fx”, or “fx -x” actually) I also get the warning that the ‘volhdr’ exceeds 2 Gbytes.

I don't have any serial console logs to share at the moment, or yet. For that I'll have to fire up the system and the storage enclosure. But, can anyone perhaps guess what I may have run into? (In other words and roughly speaking, does this sound familiar?)

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Did you update the LSI firmware? See man lsflash, the LSI7204XP uses the '949' firmware.


There's an upper limit of 2TB per LUN, the limits of XFS are in the exabyte range I think.

A couple of other observations:

[1] I have my Tezro hooked up to a SAN server (IBM DS4300, similar to SGI TP9300). Using the same LSI7204XP-LC adapters, btw. The DS4300 allows me to set the client OS when exporting a LUN. It offers about a dozen OSes, including IRIX. Anything like that in your unit?

[2] A quick search showed MediaVault 4210s with 10TB of storage. If your array allows LUNs > 2TB, does it offer options to limit volumes to 2TB? It might be serving up 64bit sector numbers (even if the most significant 32 bits are all zero) to IRIX, confusing fx and/or the kernel.

[3] As a variation on #2: maybe it will use 32bit sector numbers if you limit the total capacity to 2TB? Pull all disks and try with 2 disks on 1 channel?

[4] Maybe you can configure the array as a JBOD and use IRIX XLV/XVM software to create a volume?

[5] There's a patch that will upgrade the IP35 PROM to revision 6.211. It has to do something with 4Gb FC, but IIRC it had to do with booting over 4Gb FC, so it's probably unrelated.

[6] Have you tried with another FC adapter like a QL2342?

Sounds like a geometry problem after all.

I think you have #2 on your hands.

Yes, actually, already months ago and it worked fine with another FC enclosure (although 2-Gbit, unlike this disk array).



I remembered that correctly then...



Sadly, no. For such a relatively popular and renown brand (amongst its primary target users, in the ‘post-production’ world), it has a rather poor control and configuration interface, not to mention the lacking documentation (well, in my opinion).



It's actually just 2½ Tbytes total, which therefore puzzles me all the more.



Even though my total array size shouldn't be more than 2½ Tbytes total (divided over the two channels), I will still try with fewer disks and see what happens.



That sadly doesn't seem to be like an option, it's RAID-only by the looks of it. (Otherwise I'd have indeed opted for JBOD.)



I vaguely remember reading about that.