Firmware update for PERC 3/QC, PERC 3/DC, PERC 3/DCL and PERC 3/SC
------------------------------------------------------------------
TABLE OF CONTENTS
-----------------
1.0 Introduction
2.0 Contents of the Kit
3.0 Installation
4.0 Fixes or Enhancements Since last Release
5.0 Important Information
6.0 Change History from All Releases
6.1 Change History from 1.73 to 1.74
6.2 Change History from 1.72 to 1.73
6.3 Change History from 161n/1.63 to 1.72
6.4 Change History from 161j to 1.63/161n
6.5 Change History from 1.57 to 161j
___________________________________________________________
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 ver 1.57 or higher
for this firmware update. If you have a PERC 3/DCL running
firmware version 1.48 then please update to firmware v1.57
before this update.
____________________________________________________________
2.0 Contents of the Kit
-------------------------
This kit contains following files,
Dell178.ROM
PFLASH.EXE
Autoexec.bat
readme.txt
____________________________________________________________
3.0 Installation
-----------------
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) Double click on the file to run the executable.
3) Click on the continue button.
4) To perform the upgrade, boot using this diskette.
pflash.exe will get executed automatically and will report
existing code level and prompt you to reconfirm before starting
the firmware upgrade process.
To do this process in non-interactive mode please execute,
pflash /?
and read about possible command line switches.
____________________________________________________________
4.0 Fixes or Enhancements
--------------------------
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 an 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.
Ctrl-M Changes
--------------
None
WebBIOS changes
-----------------
1. There was a bug when a user created a logical drive greater than 1 TB.
This is fixed.
___________________________________________________________
5.0 Important Information
---------------------
Firmware upgrade while controller is doing background I/O task
--------------------------------------------------------------
Firmware upgrade process will fail if any background I/O task
(i.e. RAID-5 background consistency check or power on auto-resume
rebuild and reconstruction) is being performed.
The program will stop at the "Flash Download" screen with the
following message:
"Warning: Firmware download is in progress. Do not reboot the system.
It may cause corruption of flash or host adapter configuration".
Firmware and configuration on the adapter will not be modified by the
program. A reboot can be performed to return to the Operating System.
Wait until the background task completes before updating the firmware.
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.
6.0 Change History
___________________________________________________________
6.1 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.
BIOS Changes
-----------------
None
Ctrl-M Changes
--------------
None
WebBIOS changes
-----------------
None
========================================================================
6.2 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.
BIOS Changes
-----------------
None
Ctrl-M Changes
--------------
None
WebBIOS changes
-----------------
None
======================================================================
6.3 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.
===========================================================================
6.4 Change History from 161j to 1.63/161n
---------------------------------------
Component 161n ver Previous version
--------- ----------- ----------------
Firmware 161n 161j
BIOS 3.17 3.17
Ctrl-M 5.39 5.37
WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.41 1.41
Firmware changes:
-------------------
1. A customer experienced system hangs due to failed PCI transactions
generated by Host
2. 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.
BIOS Changes
-----------------
None
Ctrl-M Changes
--------------
1. Fixed problem related to configuration of logical drive, logical
drive size was not being displayed properly.
WebBIOS Changes
-----------------
None
========================================================================
6.5 Change History from 1.57 to 161j
-------------------------------------
Component 161j ver Previous version
--------- ----------- ----------------
Firmware 161j 1.57
BIOS 3.17 3.13
Ctrl-M 5.37 5.35
WebBIOS (Ctrl-H) 1.41 1.37
Firmware Chanqes:
-------------------
1. If a bad drive failing START_UNIT command is attached to the
controller then controller appeared to be hung during scan
as firmware attempted retries. This is fixed.
2. If a system was rebooted during reconstruction (RAID level
migration or Online Capacity Expansion) then controller was
hanging at power ON if drive(s) under reconstruction is now
missing. There was a problem in handling R/W calls if the
drive does not exist. It is fixed.
3. If a drive fails and rebuild starts the beep starts, but beep
does not stop if the configuration is cleared. It is fixed.
4. Rebuilding/Check Consistency logic is changed. Before it used
to hog the controller resources and other (host) I/O's were
given less time thus causing sever system performance degradation.
The new logic is:
- If Rebuild Rate is between 21 and 90 then the rebuild/chk-con
for the stripe is done after 92/(RebuildRate + 2) milliseconds.
- If Rebuild Rate is between 1 and 20 then the rebuild/chkcon
for the stripe is done after 200/RebuildRate milliseconds.
- If Rebuild Rate is 0 then the rebuild/chkcon for the stripe
is done after 800 milliseconds.
- Otherwise, it behaves as previous firmwares.
5. On heavily loaded RAID-10 with WriteBack setting, there were so
much I/O that SCSI chip was not handling it well. This is fixed
by throttling mechanism.
6. The chip timeout handling is enhanced to take care of various
limiting conditions.
7. Norton Anti-Virus software was issuing reads for LBA out of
range. The firmware was not handling it properly resulting in
failing of drives. This is fixed. If the LBA is out of range
the command is simply rejected.
8. Device driver timeout was logged in the system event log under
heavy IO load when certain heavily loaded drives were repeatedly
timed out by firmware. This is fixed by reducing the maximum
load on such drives after first timeout.
9. U160M hard drives that report SCSI-4 in inquiry command were
being negotiated at 80MB/s. This is fixed, now the firmware
treats it as a 160M drive.
10. When initialization is aborted the "background init" and
"auto resume" NVRAM variables were not set to aborted. They
were still set to progress. This is fixed.
11. Added mechanism to synchronize with OS driver. This prevents
the hang when Windows 2000 "new device found wizard" is
installing driver on an existing Windows 2000 system.
12. Performance Enhancements by better utilization of controller
processor resources and load balancing during R1 and R10 read I/Os.
13. Added new code to handle battery monitoring.
- Voltage level is reported only during state transition
(fast charge to monitoring, monitoring to fast charge)
- Trickle charging is now turned on at all times
This should not affect previous DELL battery interface to utilities.
14. Enhanced drive Pull recovery.
- Now a retry is done before failing all I/O from the drive.
This will avoid failing drive on spurious selection timeout which
can occur under abnormal bus condition, resulting in good drives
to be reported as failed.
- Earlier, it used to take a lot of time to fail the drive if too
many IOs were pending. Now, the IOs are completed and drive is
failed much faster.
15. Updated Cable pull algorithm. It will work in non cluster environment
too. So if the cable is pulled, all the drives in the box are not
failed immediately (though the I/O is failed). On connecting the cable
back and rebooting the machine, "Disk/Nvram Mismatch" will not be shown.
16. Added support for disk enclosures with more than 12 drives.
BIOS Changes
-----------------
1. Support added to return device path information in Get Device Parameter
call (Ext Int 13h func 48h). The SCSI ID is the logical drive number for
the drive on a particular adapter.
Ctrl-M Changes
--------------
1. Changes in 'Objects' - 'Physical Drive' menu, where
- 'Remove HSP' option is added.
- 'synchronous negotiation' option is removed.
WebBIOS Changes
-----------------
1. NVRAM mismatch occurs when a Change Logical Drive Property operation
is done. This is fixed.
2. On Physical Drive properties page, SCSI level 4 being displayed for
some drives. This is filtered off and shown as level 3.
3. The previous WebBIOS was allowing to "add" migration with smaller
drive in an array. This is fixed.
4. The WebBIOS hung if controllers are scanned during rebuild. This is fixed.
Download Driver Pack
After your driver has been downloaded, follow these simple steps to install it.
Expand the archive file (if the download file is in zip or rar format).
If the expanded file has an .exe extension, double click it and follow the installation instructions.
Otherwise, open Device Manager by right-clicking the Start menu and selecting Device Manager.
Find the device and model you want to update in the device list.
Double-click on it to open the Properties dialog box.
From the Properties dialog box, select the Driver tab.
Click the Update Driver button, then follow the instructions.
Very important: You must reboot your system to ensure that any driver updates have taken effect.
For more help, visit our Driver Support section for step-by-step videos on how to install drivers for every file type.