Intel Matrixraid on amd64

[Benny Goemans]

Hi András,

I am indeed aware of the risk that these kind of raid solutions bring with 
them and if I would do the whole system anew I would just buy a separate raid 
controller.
The thing is that there's now around 1TB of data in a raid configuration since 
one or two years and I can't change raid controllers easily. This is 
especially hard since it's a tri boot system (windows, freebsd and a test-os).

But I suppose that the driver is expected to work on amd64 just as it is on 
i386, isn't it? After all everything is showing up fine, it just seems to be 
that sysinstall has a problem using it (maybe the kernel but I'll do some more 
tests to confirm).

Regards,

Benny Goemans

On Friday 25 December 2009 18:30:49 Gót András wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I strongly advise against any of these "raid solutions". I got a very
> rough weekend beacuse of the nvidia raid. Here's the short story.
> 
> I got our new webserver with S939 Opteron and the matched nvidia chipset.
> That time FreeBSD 6.1 was the actual, so that was installed. When
> installing I noticed that the motherboard raid works with FreeBSD so I
> went with it. It turned out that it's completely transparent so I was
> happy thinking that a simple solution is not likely to go wrong.
> 
> On a weekend I went for the planned maintenance to the coloc facility.
> When the reboot came the motherboard nvidia raid told me that I have a
> failed Raid1 with one disk. The problem was that after this it refused to
> boot anymore. Later it turned out that somewhy 2 weeks ago! the nvidia
> raid dropped one disk and that left in that state (it was mountable,
> readable quite well etc.) and the other had the actual data.
> 
> Both disk was replaced then beacause I told myself that at least I'd like
> to gain something out this huge downtime. Since then gmirror was used and
> tried what it would do if I take out one this. Gmirror handled it quite
> well, I got a message in the log about the disk failure and everything
> went on. With the software raid the nvidia controller or the disk
> backplane lost one disk after half a year of uptime but a reboot corrected
> it. (There was a small thread about this that time on a FreeBSD maillist.)
> 
> On Pén, December 25, 2009 12:14 pm, Benny Goemans wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > I'm running 8.0-release (i386) on a Asus P5WDG2 motherboard with
> > integrated Intel Matrixraid (software raid) controller. Everything runs
> > fine in this one.
> >
> > Since I've noticed 64 bit support for the Nvidia driver I've been trying
> > to install the AMD64 8.0 version. During install dmesg shows my hard
> > drives and raid drives (ar0, ar1)  perfectly, just as it does in the i386
> > version. But when I enter sysinstall it can't locate my drive(s). It just
> > doesn't find a single drive, no arN but also no hdaN (which do show up in
> > dmesg).
> >
> > Has anyone seen this behaviour before and is there some kind of solution?
> >  Maybe some parameters to sysinstall, extra kernel modules to load that
> > are on the install disk or something?
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> >
> > Benny Goemans
> >
> >
> > ps. I'm currently redownloading the iso file for the cd and will check
> > its checksum to make sure I don't have some bizarre bad download
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