Netcell SyncRaid SR3000/SR5000 FreeBSD

[Jonathan Gilpin]

Hi've aquired a Netcell sync raid card and I've tried to install FreeBSD 5.4 on 
it.
Its the amd64 branch. When the machine boots I get errors like this:

Failure - SETFEATURES SET TRANSFER  timed out

The raid array does appear to be detected however when I use the fisk
utility durring the installation it complains about the drive geometry.

FreeBSD detects:  Cyl/Hd/Sect 94415/255/63

The utility suggests using 911534/104/16 I agree to this and it then says
that this suggest geometry is invalid. I continue and when it comes to
make the new file system it gives the time out errors above and then complains
it cannot write to the disk.

Communication with Netcell produced the following:

"I wanted to give you an update about the drive geometry value question.
I spoke with our CTO today, and he indicates that drive geometry values
are an old style of extremely low level calls to the hard drive that are
no longer used by most modern operating systems, who now generally use
LBA addressing. If FreeBSD is trying to make drive geometry calls
through the generic hard drive driver to our card, we will be unable to
translate them appropriately. If this is correct, than in order to work
on FreeBSD we would need to write a driver that will be able to
translate the calls appropriately, as indicated in this documentation
about SCSI controllers
http://www.infran.ru/TechInfo/BSD/handbook116.html.
"

my questions...

I really need to get this card working on FreeBSD. Is there anyone on
this list who can give me some guidence as to what information Netcell
would need to produce this driver? Are there any coders working with FreeBSD
that would help produce this driver? Are there any work arounds or quick
fixes that can be tried to get things working?


 Jonathan