In march 2011, my colleague Gregory Steulet published an article about Simulating and testing I/O performances with Orion. In this article, he wrote about a bug concerning Orion on Oracle 11.2, reported in Oracle bug number 9104898: “ORION FAILS WITH ORA-27061: WAITING FOR ASYNC I/OS FAILED”.
Trying to compare performances of storage devices on a virtual machine between a classical and a paravirtual storage adapter, I experienced the same error when using large IOs. I was using a Red Hat 5 based environment, which seems to be especially concerned by this problem:
Error completing
IO(storax_aiowait)
ORA-27061: waiting for async I/Os failed
Linux-x86_64 Error: 14:
Bad addressAdditional information: -1
Additional information: 1048576
Test aborted due to errors.
If you have already faced the problem too, there is good news! Oracle finally published a patch in November 2012 to fix this problem, reported in January … 2009!!! The patch is available for Oracle RDBMS 11.2.0.2 and 11.2.0.3. You can download it at My Oracle Support website, searching for Patch 9104898 or Patch ID 15597001.
It works fine for me now.
Don’t forget to download the last version of OPatch (6880880 in My Oracle Support) before applying this patch, as recommanded by Oracle.