LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240 with mfi driver?

[Jan Mikkelsen]

Hi,

On 31/03/2012, at 1:14 AM, Doug Ambrisko wrote:

> John Baldwin writes:
> | On Friday, March 30, 2012 12:06:40 am Jan Mikkelsen wrote:
> | ...
> | > Is this path likely to work out? Any suggestions on where to go from here?
> | 
> | You should try the updated mfi(4) driver that Doug (cc'd) is going to soon
> | merge into HEAD.  It syncs up with the mfi(4) driver on LSI's website which
> | supports several cards that the current mfi(4) driver does not.  (I'm not
> | fully sure if the 9240 is in that group or not.  Doug might know however.)
> 
> 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.
> 
> Note that I wouldn't recomend the 9240 since it can't have a battery
> option.  NVRAM is the key to the speed of mfi(4) cards.  However, that
> won't stop us from supporting 

Thanks.

I don't know what changes Sean did. Are they in 9.0-release, or do I need -stable after a certain point? I'm assuming I should be able to take src/sys/dev/mfi/... and src/usr.sbin/mfiutil/... from -current.

The performance is an interesting thing. The write performance I care about is ZFS raidz2 with 6 x JBOD disks (or 6 x single disk raid0) on this controller. The 9261 with a BBU performs well but obviously costs more.

I can see the BBU being important for controller based raid5, but I'm hoping that ZFS with JBOD will still perform well. I'm ignorant at this point, so that's why I'm trying it out. Do you have any experience or expectations with a 9240 being used in a setup like that?

Regards,

Jan.