LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240 with mfi driver?

[John Baldwin]

On Monday, April 16, 2012 10:15:10 pm Jan Mikkelsen wrote:
> 
> 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!

It should be very easy to add a 'good' command to mfiutil.  Actually, there 
already is a 'good' command.  Have you tried using that?

# mfiutil good <n>

-- 
John Baldwin