(Critical update) IBM ServeRAID MR10il SAS Controller firmware v11.0.1-0008 (DOS) - IBM System x3610 (7942)

Download Description

• New IBM xSeries firmware and device driver file naming convention
• New firmware update file formats

Severity: Critical update

Supported Adapters: IBM ServeRAID MR10il SAS Controller (44E8767)

Change history

NOTE TO SERVICE - Reference RETAIN tips: H194224, H194505, H194171

Version 11.0.1-0008 - Critical update

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue which could result in incorrect data on the drives after heavy I/O. (RETAIN tip H194224)
• Fixed an issue where, if medium errors are experienced while a background operation is running, incorrect data could be written to the drives. (RETAIN tip H194505)
• Changed the warning message that appears when the card goes in to temporary write through mode. (RETAIN tip H194171)
• Fixed an error where erroneous Bad Battery messages were displayed even after a Learn Cycle was performed.
• Fixed an issue that resulted in SERRs on a ServeRAID-MR10M controller.
• Improved the handling of bad cable scenarios which could cause system hangs.

Functionality:

• Added support for UEFI based systems.
• Added support for Solid State Drives (SSDs).
• Added tape support for the ServeRAID 10ie (CIOv) controller.
• Added the ability to handle SGPIO and SES signalling on a per-port basis to handle configurations with both direct attached and expander attached drives on a single controller.
• Added a field to show hard drive model names in WebBIOS.

Version 9.0.1-0030

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where, if a battery was fully discharged and was reported as 'missing', a reboot was be required before the battery would be detected as 'charging'.
• Fixed an issue where a hotspare was reported as unconfirmed good after replacement.
• Fixed an issue where an invalid alert 2121 was logged when a virtual drive was created.
• Display and log a warning message when a consistency check is started on an uninitialized logical drive.
• Fixed an issue where the message "SES enclosure 1 Recovered after fault" would be logged, after which the discovery process would take a very long time.
• Fixed an issue where the multipath enclosure IDs were not updated correctly when an ESM or a drive was pulled and reinserted.
• Fixed an issue where, if a unconfigured drive was pulled and reinserted, the size of the drive would be reported incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue where a dedicated hotspare would become a global hotspare. This could happen after a migration or, in some circumstances, after a system reboot.
• Fixed an issue where the firmware could hang when trying to view hotspare information under CTRL+R.
• Fixed an issue where a rebuild would not start when a new drive was inserted.
• Fixed an issue where a logical drive is still shown as optimal after a drive was pulled.
• Fixed a critical firmware error that occurred when a physical drive was pulled from a RAID10 or RAID1E during heavy I/O.
• Fixed an issue where a hang could occur when an ESM was removed.
• Fixed an issue where, if multiple physical drives are pulled from an enclosure, additional drives might be lost. This could lead to incorrect data on the disks.
• Fixed an issue where reconfiguring a virtual disk by adding a drive, or similar activity, will cause a dedicated hotspare to become unassociated.
• Fixed an issue where a success code was incorrectly returned when data was sent to a failed drive. This could cause a loss of data.
• Fixed an issue where, if additional drives failed in a virtual disk while a rebuild was happening, the system could hang.
• Fixed an issue where daisy-chained enclosures would all be reported with the same position number. Also fixed a related issue where 'locate' did not function properly for daisy-chained enclosures.
• Fixed an issue where the controller could hang if diagnostics were run while a rebuild was happening.
• Fixed an issue where hotspares were lost during configuration import.
• Fixed an issue where, if two enclosures were configured and the cable was pulled from each, then reattached in a swapped configuration, the system would hang on boot.
• Fixed an issue where successive power cycles in a multi-enclosure configuration could result in offline drives or a system hang.
• Fixed an issue where, with the controller mux set to 'Auto', configuration would be lost during reboot.
• Fixed an issue where rebuilds might fail to resume after enclosure power is restored.
• Corrected several issue where the consistency check was not properly handling double medium errors.
• Ensured that BGI (Background Initialization) setting was retained during foreign configuration import.
• Fixed an issue which caused MSM to not allow creation of additional virtual disks once 16 virtual disks existed.
• Fixed an issue that caused a hang if a rebuild was in progress when a configuration was migrated from an IR to an MR controller.
• Fixed an issue where load balancing would not resume properly after a cable pull.
• Fixed an issue where, during a target or chip reset, the Disk Write Cache setting on a SATA drive would be reset to default, which is generally 'enabled'.
• Fixed an issue where, when BGI is aborted, the status for the CC (consistency check), rather than the status for the BGI, is reported.
• Fixed an issue where, if a physical disk fails, causing a logical drive to become degraded, trying to clear or change the configuration would result in a hang until the failed drive was physically removed.
• Fixed a hang that was seen when a cable was pulled just before system shutdown.
• Ensured that a hotspare would revert back to hotspare state after a rebuild to that hotspare failed.
• Fixed several issue that could cause "Illegal Request Sense Data" messages.
• Fixed an issue where a rebuild would hang if one of the logical drives on the array was deleted during the rebuild.
• Fixed an issue which could result in incorrect data in a scenario where RAID 50 arrays are running in a degraded state for an extended period of time.
• Fixed several issues where medium errors could result in offline drives, incorrect data on drives, failed rebuilds, or system hangs.
• Fixed an issue where, when a redundant path in a multipath system fails, some drives are marked offline.
• Fixed an issue which could cause hangs when replacing a controller with an existing configuration.
• Fixed several grammatical and formatting issues.
• Fixed an issue where importing foreign configuration under CTRL-R could cause the firmware to crash.
• Fixed an issue where an unresponsive SEP could result in a "greater than 122 devices detected" message.
• Fixed an issue where the, after a RAID 6 is reconstructed as a RAID 5, the configuration is reported incorrectly upon reboot.
• Fixed an issue which could result in incorrect data on the drives when I/O is run while a capacity expansion is in progress.
• Fixed an issue that could cause a hang when an enclosure is power cycled while I/O is running.
• Fixed an issue where, if a physical drive became invalid during a rebuild to that drive, the rebuild would pause, rather than fail.
• Fixed an issue where Battery Warning messages would appear, even when disabled.
• Fixed an issue which resulted in "Unexpected sense" messages in the log with SATA drives.
• Fixed an issue where Cache Data could be lost during a power failure.
• Fixed an issue where not all SATA drives were found during discovery.
• Fixed an issue which may result in a firmware hang during a reconstruction operation.
• Fixed an issue where the firmware would continue to try to communicate with a bad drive. The symptom of this issue is a drive where the status light is blinking amber and the activity light is solid green.
• Fixed an issue where an enclosure reboot could, very rarely, cause a condition where the driver sends a Kill Adapter signal.
• Fixed an issue where, if a medium error is encountered on a source drive during a rebuild, the bad block may not get marked as bad.
• Fixed an issue where running in degraded mode with medium errors could cause the firmware to hang.
• Fixed an issue where running heavy I/O on daisy-chained enclosures for an extended period of time could cause a hang.
• Fixed an issue where, with some hardware, the configuration is not found within the timeout time on a cold reboot. This leads to a prompt to import configuration, after which, the configuration is seen correctly.
• Fixed an issue with I2C LED support.
• Fixed an issue where the write cache policy would unexpectedly change from write back to write through, then would change back after about a minute.
• Fixed an issue where, if a cable is pulled in a multipath environment, the alternate path is sometimes not followed.
• Fixed an error in the ECC error logging which can cause a memory leakage.
• Fixed an issue where the firmware will hang if discovery does not complete in two minutes.
• Fixed an issue where full initialization of a large number of SATA drives would cause timeouts.
• Fixed several LED issues with I2C backplanes.
• Fixed an issue sensing dual I2C backplanes in a multipath environment.

Functionality:

• Added support for 64 virtual disks per array.
• Added support for expanded RAID 1, a form of RAID 1E which supports even numbers of drives.
• Added the ability to hot-swap a battery.
• Added the ability to manually initiate the battery learn cycle.
• Added multipathing support for SATA drives.
• Added the ability to enable or disable NCQ from the CLI or WebBIOS.
• Added the copyback feature, which is used when a drive goes defunct and the array rebuilds to a hotspare. Copyback allows the hotspare to rebuild to a new drive that is inserted to replace the defunct drive.
• Clarified several log event messages.
• Implemented load balancing when multipath SAS is used.
• Added logging for some events that were not previously logged.
• Increased the PHY count from 512 to 640 to support 21 enclosures.

Version 8.0.1-0036

• Initial release