LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240 with mfi driver?

[Jan Mikkelsen]

On 17/04/2012, at 2:32 AM, Doug Ambrisko wrote:

> Jan Mikkelsen writes:
> | On 31/03/2012, at 1:14 AM, Doug Ambrisko wrote:
...
> | > Yes, this card is supported with the mfi(4) in projects/head_mfi.  Looks
> | > like we fixed a couple of last minute found bugs when trying to create a
> | > RAID wth mfiutil.  This should be fixed now.  I'm going to start the
> | > merge to -current today.  The version in head_mfi can run on older
> | > versions of FreeBSD with the changes that Sean did.
> | 
> | I have just imported the mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) into a 9.0-RELEASE tree to 
> | try this out.
> | 
> | When booting up with two fresh drives attached, they show up as usable 
> | JBOD disks. However, I cannot use mfiutil to create anything with them. 
> | Every drive gives
> | 
> |    "mfiutil: Drive n not available"
> 
> You might want to include the output of:
> 	mfiutil show drives
> and then the command you are trying to do to create a RAID with.
> 
> | Is this expected behaviour? How can I create a raid1 volume using 
> | mfiutil and clean disks?
> 
> I'm not sure if mfiutil can switch disks from JBOD mode to RAID.
> I don't see any reason why it shouldn't.  It can't go from RAID to 
> real JBOD mode since it doesn't have code to support that.
> 
> | I tried using MegaCli from the LSI website (versions 8.02.16 and
> | 8.02.21), but they can't even detect the controller. I know you
> | said at some point that a very recent version of MegaCli was 
> | required. What version is necessary?
> 
> What was the syntax you used since usage is cryptic?  I've never
> seen a MegaCli that couldn't access the card.  What I meant by
> more recent MegaCli is earlier versions didn't have the JBOD
> commands in it.  I have a 8.00.46 that knows about JBOD.

The MegaCli problem was an embarrassing operator error which I can't blame on the bad UI.

"mfiutil create jbod …" doesn't create a JBOD disk, it creates a raid0 volume. I think that was expected. The biggest problem with this controller and just mfiutil is that you can't get a drive from the JBOD state to the unconfigured-good state, and a blank disk starts in JBOD. So to do any setup you need to resort to the BIOS utility or MegaCli.

For each disk to change from JBOD to "Unconfigured-good" so that it can be used to create a volume, I needed to do:

   MegaCli -PDMakeGood -Physdrv '[64:1]' -force -a0

Obviously with the right drivespec.  Once they're in this state I can use mfiutil to create volumes.

I can get drives from the unconfigured-good state to JBOD by doing "MegaCli -PDMakeJBOD …". 

This is just in a little test machine with a few drives. Now that it is working to this level I will get a server with a 9240 and give it a proper run. I'll also try the driver out in one of the 9261 based servers we've got here.

Thanks!

Jan.