allan_sundry, I couldn't find any mention of support for the LP1150-E (or any Emulex FC HBA) on the
11.0-CURRENT supported hardware page, nor on the
10.2-RELEASE supported hardware page.
I agree with
tingo that booting newer FreeBSD versions from a USB stick would be a practical experiment, if that's easy for you to do. It might be sort of a "final nail in the coffin" thing for the LP1150-E though, since I couldn't find any claim that this card was supported.
If you'd like to achieve FC connectivity and your heart's not set on using an Emulex, you might consider switching to a QLogic supported by
isp(4).
Based on the prices 4Gb FC HBAs go for on eBay these days, it appears as though a lot of people are dumping their old 4Gb equipment. So buying a 4Gb QLogic shouldn't set you back much.
I recently bought two QLE2462 (4Gb, PCI-e, dual port) FC HBAs over eBay from a place in Nevada for under $20 ($10 per HBA),
including shipping. I plugged one of these HBAs in to my spare computer (Supermirco H8SCM), and
isp(4) in FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE detected it just fine. I didn't have anything to attach the HBA ports to at the time, yet it looked like it might have actually worked (with sufficient tinkering).
If your computer only has PCI-X slots, you could probably pick up a QLA2462 for a similar approximately-free price.
A lot of the QLogics on eBay are listed as Dell re-brands, because they were originally sold in Dell servers. Mine were like this. I hesitated to buy them because I was afraid having to run fishy, Dell-customized firmware images on them. Yet, when I received the boards, I found nary a mention of "Dell" anywhere on them physically, nor in their firmware setup programs accessed during POST, nor in anything reported by
isp(4). I may have simply lucked out in this regard, and some re-brands may indeed differ from vanilla from-QLogic HBAs in some way. But at only $10 each, buying one's not too great a risk.
In the recent FreeBSD quarterly report, I read that
iXsystems has sponsored a major update to
isp(4), which should make the QLogic HBAs even more attractive.
Emulex vs QLogic: this is probably a moot point since it looks like FreeBSD doesn't support Emulex FC HBAs, yet between Emulex and QLogic, I'd always recommend QLogic. From 2006 to 2009, I worked at VMware as a SAN test dude for ESX, starting with the project that first introduced 4Gb support to ESX. Between the Emulex and QLogic HBAs, the vast majority of driver and HBA firmware bugs I collided with were with the Emulex boards, which were mostly LP11002 (PCI-X) and LPe11002 (PCI-e) models. The developers there were constantly working on the lpfc driver. I can't even remember the
name of the QLogic HBA driver right now, and there's a reason for that; the QLogics worked more often.
Finally, the LP1150-E was actually a pariah board at VMware because it didn't work with ESX at all. If I remember correctly, it only worked with Windows, because it depended on a greater amount of its functionality to be implemented in the driver than the more expensive models did, and this wasn't happening in the Linux-derived lpfc driver ESX used. Its "big brothers," the LP11002 and LPe11002 had to be used instead.
