Oh, please don't remind me of this...
1) You can't. Not until Adaptec releases a driver for FreeBSD 9 (or, sigh, someone writes an open source driver). Forget about all the benefits of Softupdate+Journaling and all the good stuff in 9.
You must install FreeBSD 8.2.
2) Booting is relatively easy if it's ok with you doing a manual install.
- First configure your array in the BIOS.
- Have the kernel module from Adaptec
aacu64.ko at hand, maybe in a USB pen.
- When booting the FreeBSD live image drop into a shell and
kldload the module. Your array will appear as
/dev/aacd0.
- Then do a manual install, maybe let yourself be inspired by
http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS.
- When everything is ready in the disk, copy
aacu64.ko to
/boot/kernel and add
to
/boot/loader.conf.
And it will work. The array will be available as a BIOS drive, so the loader can load both the kernel and
aacu64.ko, and afterwards everything will be fine.
You will want to install
sysutils/arcconf, the command line configuration tool. It's terribly slow (I suppose BIOS is involved, ok) and has a terrible interface (compared to
camcontrol and the like).
3) You didn't ask, but there are some downsides to this driver, read the release notes. It does not support power management at all.
I'm running a file server with ZFS on a 6805E and a database server with UFS on a 6805 with the NVRAM module since last November or so. Obviously, my heavy-duty multi-terabyte database is used on the LAN and no one uses it during the night, and I can't power down the 16 hard disks involved here. There is more scary stuff in the release notes.
I guess it's already too late to choose a different controller, right?
Greetings,
PS: I found your question googling for a newer driver version for FreeBSD 9 but in vain.
