Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller 3/QC, 3/DC, 3/DCL and 3/SC Firmware Update Version: 198X TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Performing the Firmware Upgrade 3.0 Important Information 4.0 Fixes 5.0 Enhancements 1.0 Introduction This firmware update delivers bug fixes for following PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controllers. PERC 3/QC PERC 3/DC PERC 3/DCL PERC 3/SC NOTE: Your controller should be running firmware version 1.72 or higher before attemping this firmware update. Component Current Version Previous Version Firmware 198X 198U BIOS 3.35 3.35 Ctrl-M U827 U827 Boot Block 1.7.7Dell 1.7.7Dell 2.0 Performing the Firmware Upgrade Webpack Instructions: --------------------- This program creates a bootable diskette to upgrade the firmware of the controllers. You will need a formatted 3 1/2 inch floppy diskette for the following procedure. 1. Download the file to a directory on your hard drive. The file downloaded is a self extracting executable. 2. Insert a blank diskette into the system's diskette drive. 3. Double click on the file that you downloaded and follow the instructions on the screen to extract the files to the diskette. 4. Insert the diskette into the system with the RAID controller for which you want to update the firmware and boot the system. 5. Follow the instructions on the screen to update the firmware. NOTICE: Pflash.exe will be executed automatically and will report existing code level and prompt you to reconfirm before starting the firmware upgrade process. To perform this process in non-interactive mode please execute, Pflash /? and read about possible command line switches. 6. Remove the diskette and reboot the system. Windows Update Package Instructions: ------------------------------------ Download 1. Click the "Download Now" link to download the file. 2. If the Export Compliance Disclaimer window appears, click the "I agree" link to accept the agreement. 3. When the File Download window appears, click "Save" to save the file to your hard drive. Installation Before you begin the firmware update, stop all I/O operations and utilities. 1. Browse to the location where you downloaded the file and double-click the new file. 2. Read over the release information presented in the dialog window. 3. Download and install any prerequisites identified in the dialog window before proceeding. 4. Install any necessary Embedded Systems Management firmware prior to this BIOS update. 5. Click the Install button. 6. Follow the remaining prompts to perform the update. The Update Package can also be used with Dell OpenManage Server Administrator. See the Dell Update Package User's Guide for more information. Linux Update Package Instructions: ---------------------------------- Download 1. Click the "Download Now" link to download the file. 2. If the Export Compliance Disclaimer window appears, click the "I agree" link to accept the agreement. 3. When the File Download window appears, click "Save" to save the file to your hard drive. Installation Before you begin the firmware update, stop all I/O operations and utilities. 1. Read over the release information presented by executing the ./.bin --version command from the shell. 2. Download and install any prerequisites identified in the above step before proceeding. 3. Run the update by executing ./.bin from the shell. 4. Follow the remaining prompts to perform the update. 3.0 Important Information Firmware upgrade while controller is doing background I/O task: The firmware upgrade may fail if any of the RAID controllers in the system are performing an I/O background task. (ie. check consistency, background initialization, rebuild, or reconstruction). Allow the background task to complete before attempting to upgrade the firmware. Patrol Read tasks will not affect a firmware upgrade. Current RAID configuration will not be modified or cleared during the Firmware Upgrade process. The program will stop at the "Flash Download" screen with the following message: "Consistency Check of logical drive(s) in progress for adapter-X. Failed Writing Image on Adapter X with Baseport ...". Universal CTRL-M: Multiple adapters can be configured from CTRL-M, but the adapter must be selected using "Select Adapter" and should be verified before performing any configuration changes. Applying Factory Defaults on Clustered Configs: When the factory default settings are applied for a PERC controller in clustering mode, the card will remain in cluster mode, but BIOS will be enabled. BIOS should be disabled after applying factory default settings to avoid any system boot issues. Installing the PERC 3/DC and 3/QC in a PowerEdge 8450 System: If the PE8450 has a four channel PERC 2 controller installed along with the PERC 3/QC or PERC 3/DC then PERC 2 Ctrl-A utility may not work during system boot up. This is due to the limited amount of option ROM space for that system. In this situation, configure PERC 2 controller using OS level application or remove other controllers. Migrating from the PERC 2 to the PERC 3 controllers: If you are migrating from the PERC 2 to the PERC 3 controllers you should back up your files to tape and then install the PERC 3. Drive Migration: When hard drives are moved from one controller to another, the target controller configuration must be cleared to ensure a configuration mismatch does not occur. Any ongoing hard drive operations, such as a rebuild or reconstruction, should be completed before migrating drives to the new controller. Verifying Cache Integrity: When there is data in cache from an improper shutdown, the system may take up to sixty seconds to verify that the data in the cache is correct and does not contain any errors. The delay may appear to be a system hang, but this behavior is normal and is required to confirm the integrity of the data. TTY History: This firmware update package will disable the TTY History debug feature. If this feature is required for additional debug, then it must be reenabled after the firmware update has completed and the system has been rebooted. Consistency check: After installing this firmware and rebooting, a consistency check will automatically begin on RAID 5 and 50 virtual disks with 5 or more physical disks to ensure parity information is correct. The consistency check cannot be terminated and will resume at its last point following a reboot. This consistency check will appear as a Background Initialization but will only perform a consistency check with no data being modified. The consistency check runs in the background, allowing the virtual disks to remain accessible during the check. While this background check is designed to minimize performance impact, some degradation in performance may occur until the check is complete, especially under heavy I/O. If you have already updated to the firmware version "351X" and have run a consistency check, you do not need to update. This release contains the same firmware version with the addition of an automated, background consistency check. 4.0 Fixes 1. Fixed a timing issue that may occur when accessing RAID 5 or 50 arrays. 2. Fixed an issue that could cause a blue screen or hang when Patrol Read finds a bad block on a RAID array that is configured in a sliced config, which is when 2 or more RAID arrays are created on the same set of physical disks. 5.0 History Changes Change history from 1.97O to 198U Component Current Version Previous Version Firmware 198U 197O BIOS 3.35 3.35 Ctrl-M U827 U821 Boot Block 1.7.7Dell 1.7.6Dell NOTE: This firmware contains all of the fixes and enhancements included with PERC3 firmware version 198S. It also resolves line item number 7 noted in Fixes in Section 4 of this document. Fixes 1. Fixed an issue that optimized cache flush algorithms while switching between no read-ahead to read-ahead cache modes. 2. Modified the Fast Initialization function to delete all operation system partition table information. 3. Fixed an issue that caused PERC3 controllers to take a long time to boot with PowerVault 210 enclosures. 4. Fixed a SES Timeout error caused by a media error recovery defect in cluster mode on a PERC4/DC and a PERC3/DC. 5. Modified Ctrl-M to clear physical drive media error count upon drive replacement. Note: System must be powered on during the drive replacement in order for media errors to be cleared. 6. Modified caching algorithms to not switch from Write-back to Write-through during a battery fast charge. 7. Fixed possible hang condition unique to PERC3 controllers running firmware version 198S, resulting in SES Timeout errors or system lockup. Enhancements 1. Added Patrol Read feature. Patrol Read involves the review of the system for possible hard drive errors that could lead to drive failure, then action to correct the errors. The goal is to protect data integrity by detecting physical drive failures before the failures can damage data. Patrol Read adjusts the amount of RAID controller resources dedicated to Patrol Read operations based on outstanding disk I/O. 2. Added Rebuild Checkpoint feature. The Dell PERC firmware has a feature to resume a rebuild on a physical drive in case of an abrupt power loss or if the server rebooted in the middle of a rebuild operation. 3. Enhanced write algorithms to increase I/O performance for RAID 5 and RAID 50 virtual disks using four or more disks that are configured to use write-through write cache mode. Change History from 1.96T to 1.97O Your controller should be running firmware version 1.72 or higher for this firmware update. Component Current Version Previous Version Firmware 197O 196T BIOS 3.35 3.33 Ctrl-M U821 U812 Boot Block 1.7.6Dell 1.7.1 Bug Fixes: 1) Addressed issues found with the Firmware status Queue. This was causing the firmware to post status completion of command IDs still in progress, causing the driver to reuse those command IDs 2) Addressed an issue in the media error counter logic when drives with media errors are replaced. 3) Improved rebuild logic to handle multiple media error in the same array in corner case conditions. 4) Improved firmware error handling in cluster configurations in scenarios when nodes are rebooted frequently. 5) Disabled QAS support in firmware. 6) Addressed firmware issue causing deadlock conditions in scenarios with heavy IOs, with degraded drives and with drives being pulled/inserted. 7) Improved Firmware error handling and messages for TBBU related events. Enhancements: 1) Improve firmware behavior and reporting when a multi-bit error is encounter at boot time. If an unrecoverable (multi-bit) error is encountered, during a cache scrub at initialization, the cache is re-initialized. 2) Improve the Firmware interrupt handling for all possible interrupts and takes specific actions based on the type and source of the interrupt. 3) Improve firmware failure algorithm for failed drives based on SAF-TE information. 4) Improved firmware error handling for cable pulled/removed situations. 5) Improved firmware algorithm and error handling for drive roaming scenarios and deleted Logical Disks. 6) Improved error logging and debug information collection when the firmware hangs or crashes. 7) Improved BIOS status reporting and messaging during POST. 8) Improved error firmware handling when drives return Hardware Error (sense key code 04) in some configurations. 9) Improved Firmware behavior and error handling for SCSI bus resets when in a cluster configuration Change History from 1.92 to 1.96T Component Current Version Previous Version Firmware 196T 1.92 BIOS 3.33 3.31 Ctrl-M U812 7.09 Boot Block 1.7.1 1.6.7 Qlogic 12160t Firmware 11.12.19 11.12.19 Firmware Enhancements 1. Improved hard drive status logic when virtual disks are spanned across channels. 2. Firmware will automatically change cache settings to WriteThru when a battery problem is detected to preserve data. If WriteBack was originally selected, firmware will switch back once battery problem has been corrected. 3. In the Rebuild function of CRTL-M, a new status called “INCON” will be displayed after a rebuild operation completes if any unrecoverable errors are found in any of the hard disk drives. To identify the location of the error and if any data was present, run a check disk from the O/S (e.g. chkdsk in windows.) Note: Dell recommends that a check disk or consistency check should be run after any RAID rebuild operation is completed by the controller. Firmware Bug Fixes 1. Manual initialization calls will be rejected if a background initialization or consistency check is in progress on the logical drive. 2. Address potential controller lock-ups that could occur during either degraded, rebuilding or multiple drive pull and reinsert scenarios. 3. Addressed potential controller freezing during driver failure on possible Raid configurations 4. Consistency checks are aborted after reboot in cluster or stand alone mode. User must restart consistency check manually if needed. 5. When multiple hard drive media errors are encountered, array rebuild operation will complete. Change History from 1.80 to 1.92 Component Current version Previous version Firmware 1.92 1.80 BIOS 3.31 3.29 Ctrl-M 7.09 5.54 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.60 1.60 Firmware Enhancements 1. Enable ability to save debug information across reboots. Firmware Bug Fixes 1. The required byte count for TTY_HIST_READ is not calculated properly. Its been fixed to calculate properly now. 2. The Consistency Check Progress of the LD is read from the local copy of Consistency Array(which is not preserved across boots). Now it's made to read from NVRAM copy of Consistency Array 3. Fixed issue where misbehaving drive would cause the system to hang. 4. Fixed issue where BGI would run during an NVRAM mismatch. 5. Sense Info pointer now increments correctly. 6. Fixed issue where rebuild might not restart after reboot. Ctrl-M Changes 1. Fixed Misspellings Change History from 1.78 to 1.80 Component Current version Previous version Firmware 1.80 1.78 BIOS 3.29 3.29 Ctrl-M 5.54 5.54 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.60 1.60 Firmware Bug Fixes 1. When media errors are detected during Rebuild operations, the rebuild is unable to complete because the data cannot be reconstructed. A Media Error detected during a Rebuild operation cannot be recovered, and can result in loss of data. All redundant logical drives will be initialized. More specifically, this means that a background initialization (BGI) will also be performed on 3 and 4 drive RAID 5 arrays, and all RAID 1 arrays (and RAID 10/50 variants). 2. Improper reassigning of bad sectors when Write_and_Verify command fails with Media Error (03 11 01). Firmware configures disks to automatically reassign sectors by setting AWRE bit in mode page 1. However some drives do not reassign properly when Write_and_Verify fails & typically return Media Error. Recovery state machine modified and 2 new states added to perform reassign & then reissue original command. 3. Data under run is detected by firmware and after multiple retries; the drive is failed. During SCSI READ, the target completes its data transfer, then disconnects from the SCSI bus without issuing a Save Data Pointers message. When the target reselects the initiator, it sends the final (successful) status. Following a very specific (and uncommon) sequence of SCSI events, the MegaRAID firmware misinterprets the returned command status, and incorrectly simulates a Data Under Run error. The simulated Data Under Run condition will not be generated when the Residual Transfer Count is zero (normal completion). Change History from 1.74 to 1.78 Component Current ver 1.74 version Firmware 1.78 1.74 BIOS 3.29 3.27 Ctrl-M 5.54 5.54 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.60 1.47 Firmware Bug Fixes: 1. Hard drive drops off line after power cycling hard drive the fix was to renegotiate for all request sense commands. BIOS Changes 1. Fixed minor bug in Bios. 2. There was a bug where the PERC Bios would hang waiting for a response from the firmware. This would occur if there was data in the cache on boot up. This is fixed. This only affected PERC 3/DC and PERC 3/DCL. WebBIOS changes 1. There was a bug when a user created a logical drive greater than 1 TB. This is fixed. Change History from 1.73 to 1.74 Component 1.74 ver Previous version Firmware 1.74 1.73 BIOS 3.27 3.27 Ctrl-M 5.54 5.54 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.47 1.47 Firmware Changes: 1. Dellconf had a bug where it would hang on launching diagnostics. The fix is that diagnostics commands are not getting properly incremented in the firmware. This is fixed. Change History from 1.72 to 1.73 Component 1.73 ver 1.72 version Firmware 1.73 1.72 BIOS 3.27 3.27 Ctrl-M 5.54 5.54 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.47 1.47 Firmware Changes: 1. An issue has been seen with some of the Fujitsu U160 drives. During I/O stress, some Fujitsu drives intermittently report write media error with sense key "0C 03" (recommend re-assign). PERC 3 controllers (firmware version 161n/1.63 and before) set drive to do re-assignment automatically and do not expect this return. They do not handle the error well and cause systems to hang. This issue is fixed in this firmware. The change is limited and minor, that in case drives report write media error with sense key "0C 03", 4 retries will attempt before failing the drive. This change recovers the specific error reported by Fujitsu drives and I/O process continues. Change History from 161n/1.63 to 1.72 Component 1.72 ver 161n/1.63 version Firmware 1.72 161n/1.63 BIOS 3.27 3.17 Ctrl-M 5.54 5.39 WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.47 1.41 Firmware Changes: 1. When a new Logical Drive has more than 4 drives, the firmware started a consistency check at the newly added data. 2. The System hangs due to failed PCI Transactions generated by Host. Added Firmware work around to guarantee Command Integrity. 3. Data miscompare problem due to misbehaving signal on i960RN after Power-Cycle. 4. Changed DRAM Signature to work around HW problem and properly recover dirty data in Cache. 5. Random Deletion feature of logical drives is enabled. 6. Check is put in for SAF-TE presence when looking for predictive failures. 7. Firmware now reduces the number of outstanding commands to the drives in a case of drive time-outs. 8. Chip timeout and chip reset could occur during recovery of write commands in write back mode. It is now fixed. 9. Reduced group size for caching to support stripe size of 2K. 10. The difference in the number of pending commands is detected to improve FASTIO R1 load balancing. 11. The firmware now determines the disk whose head is nearer to the requested LBA. 12. Memory allocating for different cache pools in the ratio of logical drives associated with each cache poll. BIOS Changes 1. More time delay introduced for invoking CTRL M & CTRL H. 2. To display in mother board BIOS BBS menu as PERC 3/DCL. 3. BIOS Grammatical Errors figured out by DELL are fixed. 4. A bug in the code, which prevented the invoking of CTRL-M, is fixed in this release. Ctrl-M Changes 1. Disallow spanning across partially configured arrays. 2. To allow different memory segments usage by Ctrlm to make newer bigger Ctrlm run on many DELL motherboards. 3. Logical drives with number larger than zero being in background initialization were detected as being in check consistency state. This has been fixed. 4. Distinguish background initialization and background check consistency. 5. "SCSI Standard" string in physical drive information window was misspelled as "SCSI Sdandard". 6. Added support for PERC 4/DI. 7. Added support for the CERC ATA100/4Ch Controller. 8. Support added for NAS features. 9. Added En/Disable Write cache option in physical device menu if device is SCSI DISK. WebBios Changes 1. When we span 8 arrays during create LD, WebBIOS takes 9 and creates a LD. This was happening only in the cluster-enabled mode. This is fixed now. 2. If user selects a filled array (i.e one with no empty space) during create, we were running into problems. This is fixed. 3. Support added for Random Deletion of Logical drives.