boot zfs array from hba

[Miroslav Lachman]

Richard Kearsley wrote:
> Hi
> I am having some problems booting a raidz1 array from a lsi 2308 HBA on
> a supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F-JBOD board
> I believe the problem is that the bios only exposes one of the disks on
> the HBA to the bootloader, resulting in the loader thinking the array is
> degraded
> FreeBSD must detect the disks itself at some point - through mps(4), but
> it does not happen early enough in the boot procedure...
>
> My question is there a trick, or something I'm missing, to be able to
> boot an array from a HBA?
> I'm using FreeBSD 9.1
>
> The error I get at boot is as follows:
> ZFS: i/o error - all block copies unavailable
> ZFS: can't read object set for dataset u
> ZFS: can't open root filesystem
> gptzfsboot: failed to mount default pool ssd
>
> FreeBSD/x86 boot
> Default: ssd::
> boot:

I had the same problem on Dell server with H200 (rebrended LSI 2008). I 
post about the workaround here 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2013-November/018536.html

I did small partition on each disk with ZFS mirror (mirroring all disk) 
and place the /boot or whole base system on this mirrored pool instead 
of RAIDZ pool (later created on second partition covering the rest of 
the disks)

Miroslav Lachman