Support for Areca ARC-1300-4X on 8-STABLE?

[Paul Mather]

On Nov 24, 2010, at 12:32 AM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 09:41:43PM -0500, Paul Mather wrote:
>> Does anyone know whether the Areca ARC-1300-4X external SAS HBA is
>> currently supported under FreeBSD/amd64 8-STABLE?  I just fired up a
>> system that has one of these cards that is running 8.0-RELEASE and the
>> HBA is not being detected properly by FreeBSD.  (It is being
>> misidentified by the arcmsr driver.)  I'm hoping that once I upgrade
>> from 8.0-RELEASE to a contemporary 8-STABLE that it'll be supported.
>> I found a posting on the Web that indicated a driver would be
>> available in the first quarter of 2010
>> (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/2009-December/006115.html).
>> 
>> I'm really hoping I can use this card, though I'm somewhat discouraged
>> by the fact that the Areca Web site lists only drivers for Windows,
>> Linux, and Mac OS X for this particular model. :-(
> 
> Have you contacted Areca about this?  Their Technical Support folks
> would be able to tell you why this is, and if there is work being done
> to provide a driver for FreeBSD.  A hardware vendor that is known to
> support FreeBSD is more authoritative about their drivers than the
> FreeBSD Project.  :-)

I'll concede the latter point, but I'd also hope that such a vendor would be contributing its drivers directly into the source tree rather than having a separate set of patches or downloads for end-users to fiddle about with.  I prefer my updates to come via csup. :-)

The only Areca port I can see is the one for the CLI for their RAID cards (sysutils/areca-cli).

I have contacted their support e-mail address asking what the situation is, from the horse's mouth, so to speak.  I hope the news is good.

> Also, please see this thread (which is very recent):
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-November/059985.html

Thanks for the link!  I'm not sure whether "Fixed arcmsr driver prevent arcsas support for Areca SAS HBA ARC13x0" in the "Bug fixes" list is good news or bad news for me.  It suggests that the arcmsr driver has been fixed to prevent it attaching to the ARC-13X0 cards, implying that it is not supported.  This entry about OS support on the Areca official page for the ARC-1300 product (http://www.areca.us/products/sasnoneraid.htm) is also not inspiring: "BSD/FreeBSD (will be available with 6Gb/s Host Adapter)."  Does this mean only their 6 Gb/s cards will be supported under FreeBSD, or that support for the 3 Gb/s cards will appear alongside the 6 Gb/s cards, whenever they are released?

I have to say all this has left a sour taste in my mouth.  I chose Areca because of their solid FreeBSD support. :-(

Cheers,

Paul.