installing FreeBSD on partition of a SATA Intel 865 raid0 volume

[Doug Ambrisko]

Saulius Menkevicius writes:
| Doug White wrote:
| >On Fri, 25 Mar 2005, James Wood wrote:
| >>How do you setup FreeBSD on a partition of a raid0 volume? I downloaded
| >>FreeBSD 5.3, then made a 60 GB partition in my raid volume, and then went to
| >>boot from the CD. It did not see any raid volumes, it just sees two HDs.
| >
| >FreeBSD does not recognize the Adaptec HostRAID metadata so you will not
| >be able to use RAID volumes configured with the HostRAID BIOS. You can use
| >atacontrol to create FreeBSD software RAIDs, however.
|  
| Actually there are is an unofficial patch to support the RAID0 mode in 
| ICH5-R.
| http://www.ambrisko.com/doug/ata/ contains the patch, and I used it 
| without problems for half a year in
| an i865pe/ich5-r configuration with RAID0 disk setup. (That was an older 
| version of the patch, though).

FYI, Saulius ported the Intel RAID meta data to 5.3 a while ago.  I put
it up at:
	http://www.ambrisko.com/doug/ata/5.3-intel-raid-meta-data.patch

FYI2, I should have a newer version of my ata patches since I finally
figured out a bug I was having with a NFS root mount.  The nfs_syncer
spin-loops on bp queues and expects an interrupt routine to break it out
on the side.  Then soft updates tends to re-schedule work even when there
is no work to do.  These aren't really part of the ata stuff but are
required to make it work better.  Lastly I've made some more RAID
robustness changes to deal with some error conditions we've caused
here in testing.

I need to roll them out of our dev. tree into my release tree.

Then I should finally start getting to merge the HW support into
FreeBSD 4.X tree now that I know the spin-loop bugs I was seeing 
wasn't something wacky in my code.

Doug A.