Dell PERC6?

John Baldwin jhb at freebsd.org
Wed Jan 23 06:49:41 PST 2008


On Sunday 20 January 2008 09:50:36 am Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 10:35:21AM +0100, Ferdinand Goldmann wrote:
> > Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> >> You'd be best off with RELENG_7 and not 6.3, but yes, the controller in
> >> question should work on RELENG_6 and RELENG_6_3.
> >
> > Very well, seems like I am going to give RELENG_7 a try then.
> > Thanks to everyone who replied!
> 
> Another user just posted to -stable about problems with these Dell
> machines and PERC6.  I'm not sure if you're subscribed to -stable or
> not, so here's the thread:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-January/039791.html

The problem folks are having are with using volumes greater than 1 TB.  The
BSD label cannot handle such large disks.  Instead, if you are just using
the disk for data you can newfs /dev/mfid1 directly and use it as a
filesystem, or if you need to partition the disk you can use gpt(8) to do
so.  If you need to boot from such a large disk you will need to use the
GPT boot code in HEAD (I will backport it to 6.x and 7.x soon).  I've
successfully used it to boot on 2 TB mfi(4) volumes.  Unfortunately
sysinstall doesn't support GPT at all, only the older MBR + BSD label
method.

Note that this problem has nothing to do with mfi(4) at all, but it is a
limitation of the BSD label + MBR that applies to any volume >= 2 TB.

-- 
John Baldwin


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