IBM ServeRaid M1015 and FreeBSD

M

Migelo

Hi!

I'm looking for a way to expand the number of my SATAII ports and have come across this card: IBM ServeRaid M1015.
I'll be using it just to passthrough the HDDs to the system because of ZFS.

Does it really work without problem with the latest FreeBSD release?

Are there any things I need to do, to get it working?

If you know a better and possibly cheaper solution for at least 8xSATAII ports, please let me know.
 
Weren´t you supposed to flash the firmware into Initiator/Target(IT) mode first, or does it "just work"?

/Sebulon
 
If I'm lucky, maybe I will get it before 2013. In either case, I'll be reporting my results.
 
You can run it under mfi driver (with original firmware) or under mps driver (without).

If you want to use "hardware" raid1/raid0/raid10, use mfi
If you want to just pass through disks, flash it to "9210-8i" and use the mps driver.


Cross flashing is not for the faint of heart, and sometimes require trying different computers/BIOS versions to successfully complete. Be aware that cross flashing etc is usually 100% unsupported by LSI or anyone else, not recommended for enterprise production.

Under mfi, un raided disks show up as "/dev/mfisyspd*", with about equal performance to da devices from mps. However, as far as I know you can't get info like linkspeed or drive cache status out of the mfi driver.

If you are using ZFS, you should be able to switch between mps and mfi without doing anything to your pool.
 
Yes - these cards work well...I had issues with 2 x defective HDD's causing instability, but once replaced has been very fast and stable cards to use. Notes on what I am using below:

Code: 
[cpu]		Intel Xeon E3-1220-V2
[mobo]		Supermicro X9SCM-F (bios 2.0a)
[ram]		(4x) Crucial CT51272BA1339 [4GB DDR3 Unbuffered ECC]
[ssd]		Crucial M4 64GB (fw 000F)
[sas card]	(3x) IBM M1015 (IT mode v15)
[mps driver]	manually loading LSI's mpslsi driver v15
[hdd]		(3x) 2TB Seagate ST2000DL003
		(3x) 2TB WD WD20EARS
		(2x) 2TB WD WD20EFRX (RED)
		(1x) 2TB Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 
                (1x) 2TB Samsung/Seagate ST2000DL004
[os]		FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE amd64
[NFS]		v4
[ZFS]		v28, dedupe, compression OFF
 
Was that the card's fault, or the HDD's?

The card is on the way from Austria! And just today, I got the SAS->4xSATA cable, it was very expensive, 26€(with shipping).......
 
HDD's were at fault - both were failing smartctl parameters and longtests once looked into.

This did not make the mps driver for SAS2008 chipset happy, which in turn ZFS got fed-up and booted the HDD's from the array. This wasn't always the 2 faulty HDD's directly which is why it took me awhile to pinpoint the cause with smartctl longtests.

Once those 2 x HDD's were replaced I haven't seen a mps driver or ZFS issues since - knock on wood - doing a 9TB transfer of data and several scrubs . ;-)
 
Bad drives, making the controller unhappy xD.

Thanks for your feedback! I'm more and more confident that it'll work w/o problems. (after I can solve the "EncoderFFmpeg.cpp:80: error: 'AVIO_FLAG_READ' was not declared in this scope" when compiling XBMC)
 
Ok, I finally got the card. If I just want to passthrough the disks I can just use the MPS drivers by adding
Code: 
mps_load="YES"

??
 
Are you sure?

I get
Code: 
mfi0: command 0xffffff8001b9e44o timeout after 59 seconds

And the it just repeats with increasing numbers of seconds.
It happens with or without disks attached.
 
What I did - two main steps is update the M1015's firmware + dload and load LSI's version of the firmware.

All files can be found here: http://www.lsi.com/support/Pages/Do...Host Bus Adapters&productname=LSI SAS 9211-8i

1) Flash the M1015 to the v15 'IT-mode' firmware.

LSI9240(IBM M1015) to a LSI9211-IT mode

Code: 
1) Boot with FreeDOS USB drive with all dloaded stuff on it.
2) megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin
3) megarec -cleanflash 0
4) Boot into BIOS, Exit, Boot into UEFI shell
5) fs0:
6) sas2flash.efi -o -f 2118it.bin
7) sas2flash.efi -o -sasadd 500605b003e321f0	<different per card>
8) sas2flash.efi -listall			<to verify fw updated>

**BIG NOTE**
Above is my own crib notes, but there's lots more info out there like this URL and others. This was for my Supermicro X9SCM-F mobo that had UEFI for instance...yours maybe be slightly different process and might not need to deal with UEFI.

http://brycv.com/blog/2012/flashing-it-firmware-to-lsi-sas9211-8i/


2) Dload and use LSI's FreeBSD v15 driver.

This one is easy.

Code: 
1) Dload the 'Free_BSD_Driver_P15' and copy the mpslsi.ko to /boot/kernel/.
2) Add mpslsi_load=”YES” to /boot/loader.conf
3) Reboot and run sysctl -a | grep mps ... if you see something like the below - SUCCESS - both card + system using the v15 drivers.

dev.mpslsi.1.firmware_version: 15.00.00.00
dev.mpslsi.1.driver_version: 15.00.00.00

Hope this helps.

My system has been running good since doing this outside of the occasional hardware gremlin...
 
Thanks! I'm going to try and do it now.

One thing though, after this the card will be in IT-mode, does that mean that I'll be able to switch from mps and mpi diver?
 
Do you mean the kernel's default 'mps' driver and LSI's 'mpslsi' driver?

If so, yes...just don't add anything to /boot/loader.conf and you'll be using the stock driver.

If there is an actual 'mpi' driver - I don't know what that is...once the card's are flashed only way to get them back to other state is to re-flash them.
 
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