Technical Advisory
This Technical Advisory describes an issue which may or may not affect the customer’s product
Technical Advisory TA-835-00
5200 NE Elam Young Parkway
Hillsboro, OR 97124
September 7, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Intel Corporation. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
Intel® Server RAID Controller SRCSAS18E, SRCSAS144E, SROMBSAS18E
(With The S5000PSL, SR2500ALLX, SR1550ALSAS, FALSASMP); Driver
Incorrectly Reports Operating System Status Errors
Information in this document is provided in connection with Intel products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise,
to any intellectual property rights is granted by this document. Except as provided in Intel's Terms and Conditions of Sale for such
products, Intel assumes no liability whatsoever, and Intel disclaims any express or implied warranty, relating to sale and/or use of
Intel products including liability or warranties relating to fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, or infringement of any patent,
copyright or other intellectual property right. Intel products are not intended for use in medical, life saving, or life sustaining
applications. Intel may make changes to specifications and product descriptions at any time, without notice. The Intel® Server
controller SRCSAS144E, SRCSAS18E, S5000PSL, SR2500ALLX, SR1550ALSAS, FALSASMP, SHW4URM3SA, SHW6URM3SA
may contain design defects or errors known as errata which may cause the product to deviate from published specifications. Current
characterized errata are available on request.
Products Affected
SRCSAS144E
SRCSAS18E
S5000PSLROMB
SR2500ALLX
SR1550ALSAS
FALSASMP
SHW4URM3SA
SHW6URM3SA
Description
Intel has identified an issue with the Storport versions of the megasas.sys and msas2k3.sys Windows drivers version
1.20.0 and earlier. The Storport driver, new to Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003, was developed to deliver greater
performance in hardware RAID than the preexisting Miniport driver, which was designed to work optimally with the
parallel SCSI interconnects. The Windows operating system will timeout when the driver does not complete a command
within the defined timeout period and returns an incorrect command status for other commands received during this
timeout period. This can result in data commands not being correctly transacted because a READ or WRITE command
isn’t processed by the controller and the operating system is given an incorrect command status. This situation can
only occur when command timeouts are occurring, and should only occur on a very heavily-loaded system.
Root Cause
The status of all commands issued to the driver is PENDING. If the driver returns a command to the Operating System
with a PENDING status, the Operating System will treat this as an error and log an event in the system log. When the
driver returns a command to the Operating System without changing the status, the Operating System treats the
command as successful and completes the command to the application. This scenario can result in data not being
correctly managed because a READ or WRITE command isn’t actually processed by the controller.
Corrective Action / Resolution
The driver has been updated to set the completion status to BUSY when commands are received during a reset
recovery operation. This will force the Operating System to reissue the command for later processing. Driver 1.21.0 is
available for download at http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/server
. Customers are advised to download
and apply this driver, or a later driver, to all production systems that utilize the Intel RAID controllers listed above.