Stable on Supermicro server?

[Doug Ambrisko]

Chris Foote writes:
| On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Ben Stuyts wrote:
| 
| >
| > On 14 Jul 2004, at 02:12, Chris Foote wrote:
| >
| >> On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Ben Stuyts wrote:
| >> 
| >>> I am planning on building a FreeBSD server with a Supermicro 5013C-T 1U 
| >>> server. It has a Supermicro P4SCE motherboard, with a P4 of around 2.8 
| >>> GHz, and 512MB or 1 GB memory. I am planning on adding two Western 
| >>> Digital Raptor 74 GB SATA drives in mirror.
| >
| >> The SATA RAID controller, although it provides a 'legacy' option
| >> which should expose the RAID as an ordinary device, doesn't work
| >> despite the fact that both disk drives' LEDs flash when RAID 1 is
| >> enabled ;-(  The RAID isn't supported by almost any operating system.
| >
| > So I'm not sure I understand fully: is there a way to connect the sata drives 
| > to the onboard ich5 controller, and make them work as separate (not raid) 
| > devices? In that case I could use vinum.
| 
| If you enable 'legacy' mode in the BIOS settings for the RAID, and
| select 'IDE' mode rather than 'RAID', then you end up with 2 simulated
| ata drives which you can access with any operating system:
| 
| ad0: 114473MB <WDC WD1200JD-00GBB0> [232581/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA100
| ad1: 114473MB <WDC WD1200JD-00GBB0> [232581/16/63] at ata0-slave UDMA100
| 
| so you could use vinum on them.

Legacy mode just refers to where the ATA controller gets mapped into
I/O space.  RAID in the terms of ICH just flips the device ID so the
RAID BIOS can pass a hint to the OS that it is in RAID mode.  RAID is
SW RAID on the ICH.  Native versus legacy is where the I/O is mapped
and how the SATA/PATA ports get mapped.  In some configurations you
can overlay the SATA ports on top of the PATA ports then lose access
to those devices.

Regarding running vinum etc. on top of 4.X will be bad since if you
have a media error or a drive spin down/up you will get a wedged
system during disk access.  My patches address this and adds support
for reading and writing the Intel RAID meta-data.  It also has some
enhancement to atacontrol and supports hot-swap of SATA devices on
ICH.

Doug A.