Freebsd ciss driver logical drive limit

Lately, I was faced with a strange problem on a HP server which uses HP Smart Array controller P800 which is running Freebsd. All my 24 hard drives which is hosted on externel HP enclosures was presented as 24 single raid0 logical volumes. Surprisingly, when the freebsd booted it doesn't presented the disks and disabled the ciss driver (HP Smart Array Controller) with following message

Mar 12 16:00:41 freebsd kernel: ciss1: adapter claims to report absurd
number of logical drives (24 > 15)

A quick check on the driver source code showed up that there is a hard limit defined to 15.(/usr/src/sys/dev/ciss/cissvar.h)

 #define CISS_MAX_LOGICAL        15

So I wanted to be sure if I change the number to a higher value , won't do any unwanted behavior later on the system. In that point I contacted Paul Saab where he explained the limit as  below.

 really that's done to limit the amount of memory needed upfront by the
driver.  I believe you can easily increase the number of drives
without issue as long as you have enough memory below 4GB.  Parts of
the ciss driver require that the memory you DMA from be under 4G

After the clarification, I just set the number to 32 and rebuild/install the kernel, restart the machine and a quick check on dmesg showed up all my 24 logical volumes presented on HP P800 controller.

Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da19: 286070MB (585871964 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C)
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da20 at ciss1 bus 0 scbus2 target 19 lun 0 
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da20:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da20: 135.168MB/s transfers
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da20: Command Queueing enabled
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da20: 286070MB (585871964 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C)
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da21 at ciss1 bus 0 scbus2 target 20 lun 0 
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da21:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da21: 135.168MB/s transfers
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da21: Command Queueing enabled
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da21: 286070MB (585871964 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C)
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da22 at ciss1 bus 0 scbus2 target 21 lun 0 
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da22:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da22: 135.168MB/s transfers
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da22: Command Queueing enabled
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da22: 286070MB (585871964 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C)
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da23 at ciss1 bus 0 scbus2 target 22 lun 0 
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da23:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da23: 135.168MB/s transfers
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da23: Command Queueing enabled
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da23: 286070MB (585871964 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C)
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da24 at ciss1 bus 0 scbus2 target 23 lun 0 
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da24:  Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da24: 135.168MB/s transfers
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da24: Command Queueing enabled
Mar 13 10:32:37 freebsd kernel: da24: 286070MB (585871964 512 byte sectors: 255H 32S/T 65535C)

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Linux like dmesg in Freebsd

In my previous post, I was talking about the "dmesg -c" equivalent in FreeBSD. Simply it was a sysctl command. So, I decided to simply change FreeBSD dmesg command and make it act like in as Linux. All you have to do is download my patch and apply it as shown below.I was tested the patch on FreeBSD 9 btw.

mybsd# pwd
/usr/src/sbin/dmesg
mybsd# patch < dmesg.patch 
Hmm...  Looks like a unified diff to me...
The text leading up to this was:
--------------------------
|--- dmesg.c.org        2012-01-03 19:04:44.000000000 +0200
|+++ dmesg.c    2012-02-28 11:36:22.000000000 +0200
--------------------------
Patching file dmesg.c using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 81.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 194.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 204.
done
mybsd# make 
Warning: Object directory not changed from original /usr/src/sbin/dmesg
cc -O2 -pipe  -std=gnu99 -fstack-protector -Wsystem-headers -Werror -Wall -Wno-format-y2k -W -Wno-unused-parameter -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wreturn-type -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings -Wswitch -Wshadow -Wunused-parameter -Wcast-align -Wchar-subscripts -Winline -Wnested-externs -Wredundant-decls -Wold-style-definition -Wno-pointer-sign -c dmesg.c
cc -O2 -pipe  -std=gnu99 -fstack-protector -Wsystem-headers -Werror -Wall -Wno-format-y2k -W -Wno-unused-parameter -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith -Wreturn-type -Wcast-qual -Wwrite-strings -Wswitch -Wshadow -Wunused-parameter -Wcast-align -Wchar-subscripts -Winline -Wnested-externs -Wredundant-decls -Wold-style-definition -Wno-pointer-sign  -o dmesg dmesg.o -lkvm

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Clearing FreeBSD Kernel Message Buffer

As you can clear kernel message buffer on Linux with dmesg command " dmesg -c ", it's a little bit different on a BSD system.It's done by sysctl as following

# sysctl kern.msgbuf_clear=1

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Boosting Radware Defense Pro's performance ;)

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Detailed network interface statistics on Linux

Here is a helpful command for getting interface statistics on your linux box. It's called ip. It's bundled with iproute package. You can see information about dropped, collisions,crc,transmit and other info about your network interface.

root@helga:~# ip -s -s link show eth0
2: eth0:  mtu 1500 qdi
WN qlen 1000
  link/ether 00:24:8c:d5:6a:a7 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
  RX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped overrun mcast
  1633058095 16933162 0       0       0       0    
  RX errors: length  crc     frame   fifo    missed
             0        0       0       0       0    
  TX: bytes  packets  errors  dropped carrier collsns
  1994496524 5588574  0       0       0       0    
  TX errors: aborted fifo    window  heartbeat
             0        0       0       0    

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I/O usage per process on Linux

Linux kernel 2.6.20 and later supports per process I/O accounting. You can access every process/thread's I/O read/write values by using /proc filesystem. You can check if your kernel has built with I/O account by just simply checking /proc/self/io file. If it exists then you have I/O accounting built-in.

$ cat /proc/self/io
rchar: 3809
wchar: 0
syscr: 10
syscw: 0
read_bytes: 0
write_bytes: 0
cancelled_write_bytes: 0

Field Descriptions:

rchar  - bytes read
wchar  - byres written
syscr  - number of read syscalls
syscw  - number of write syscalls
read_bytes  - number of bytes caused by this process to  read
            from underlying storage
write_bytes - number of bytes caused by this process to written from
            underlying storage

As you know, ever process is presented by it's pid number under /proc directory. You can access any process's I/O accounting values by just looking /proc/#pid/io file. There is a utility called iotop which collects these values and shows you in like top utility. You see your processes I/O activity with iotop utility.

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problem compiling Mysql 5.1 with sphinx engine support

Mysql's full-text search engine is not very powerful and support comes only with Myisam engine. Sphinx is a full-text search engine replacement for Mysql and Postgresql. Also, It's possible to use Sphinx full-text search engine with both Myisam and InnoDB engines. You can read detailed information about mysql compilation with sphinx on Sphinx site.

I have faced with following error message, while compiling Mysql with innodb and sphinx engine support ( ./configure --prefix=/data/mysql3/ --with-plugins=sphinx,innobase). I used the innodb (base) which bundled with Mysql. You can also compile innodb plugin which has additional features. For example, on the fly compression, speed improvements.

configure: error: unknown plugin: sphinx

The trick was to run autorun.sh command in Mysql's source tree before running configure with sphinx engine support. This script will create a new configure script which knows how to compile sphinx engine.

# ./BUILD/autorun.sh

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