Broadcom AERO SAS adapter: JBOD personality bug

Hi,

Hope someone from Broadcom is still lurking here ;)

I have seen a problem with a new Broadcom Aero SAS adapter on FreeBSD. I first detected it on TruNAS 12 but the
issue affects FreeBSD 13.1 as well.

The card came with RAID firmware installed (dealer fault, but with crazy delivery times now I am afraid we must swallow it)
but fortunately it has “Personalities”. 

So, if I set it up in “JBOD personality” it does behave like a plain HBA. Good!

However, I have noticed a problem in the JBOD personality. I am not sure whether it is a firmware bug, a design error
or  a problem with the mrsas driver although after a quick look at the source code I don’t think the driver can
solve this.

After a disk failure (for example, pulling a disk from the backplane) the controller will mark it as
UNCONFIGURED BAD. Which is a dead end that may require a system reboot or at least using a tool such as
StorCli (if it is possible, I haven’t verified that yet).

If this is a design decision I THINK THIS IS A MISTAKE. If the JBOD personality is equivalent to an HBA (it should
be!) the controller firmware should not interfere with decisions made by the operating system itself.

As for the mrsas driver, I am not sure, is there a possibility to add a tunable so that can ignore the “unconfigured badness”
and proceed? 

The controller is a Broadcom AERO 10E2
Firmware: 5.180.02-2512
NVDATA version: 5.1800.21-0642


Thanks!





Borja Marcos.