Driver MPS(4) not loading

[rdenney]

I'm creating a N4F server on an old Dell box. It's a 32-bit P4 with 4G of RAM, with a GigE card and a SAS/SATA controller. The network connection is fine, and I've done a full OS on a 60G SSD that is connected to the motherboard's SATA port. All good there.

But I cannot get it to recognize the disk host bus adapter. It is an IBM M1015 that has been flashed with LSI SAS9210-8i(IT-mode) firmware. I have tested the controller under Windows XP, and it had no trouble accessing disks. I have four disks attached to one of the SAS expansion cables, each 2TB. Two are new and unformatted and two I pulled from a DLINK DNS-323 that this system will replace. The LSI boot sequence shows all four disks properly, so I don't think there is a hardware issue with their installation.

FreeBSD seems to be seeing the controller at the hardware level. PCICONF -LV sees the card. Here's the relevant portion of that output:

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none1@pci0:1:0:0:       class=0x010700 card=0x30401000 chip=0x00721000 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
    device     = 'SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]'
    class      = mass storage
    subclass   = SAS
re0@pci0:3:1:0: class=0x020000 card=0x816910ec chip=0x816910ec rev=0x10 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.'
    device     = 'RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

This controller is supposed to be supported by the mps(4) driver in FreeBSD 8.something and above. I installed NAS4FREE 9.1.0.1.431, which is supposed to come with the standard FreeBSD 9+ driver pack that specifically supports this controller, particularly with the IT-mode firmware.

I've looked in every line in /var/run/dmesg.boot, and no devices attached to this controller are shown.

I read this thread on the FreeBSD forum, and tried the kldload mps, seeing that mps.ko is in /boot/kernel. followed by adding 'mps_load="YES"' to /boot/loader.conf, to no avail.

Assuming the MPS(4) driver is supported as claimed, how do I force it to become attached to this device?

I've spent about a hundred hours reading up on this before buying the bits, and probably another 50 trying to figure this problem out on my own. Other people use this controller with NAS4FREE, so there's something I'm doing wrong. I'm trying to report what I did in detail, but I know very little about Unix-type systems, so I need advice that uses little words, and that comes with the why so that I can actually maintain this machine.

Rick "appreciative" Denney

[raulfg3]

any news?

Sorry no help for my side I do not have enought know to help in your case.

[fsbruva]

Are you running full or embedded install?

From the README located at the manufacturer's website:

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1.Detect Driver version loaded on FreeBSD. 
“sysctl –a |grep mps” [ check for driver_version in output of command ]

Do you see this?

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device   mps

Also, perhaps it would be helpful to enable debugging of the driver, since all signs point to it being supported.

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To enable debugging prints from the mps driver, set the

	   hw.mps.X.debug_level

     variable, where X is the adapter number, either in loader.conf(5) or via
     sysctl(8).  The following bits have the described effects:

	   0x01 	 Enable informational prints.

	   0x02 	 Enable tracing prints.

	   0x04 	 Enable prints for driver faults.

	   0x08 	 Enable prints for controller events.

[rdenney]

Sorry, guys, should have closed the loop.

Frankly, it just took too long to get an idea about this problem. I think I am not experienced enough with FreeBSD to be that far from assistance.

I'm trying out unRAID, which has its own issues, too, but it seems to have a more active support community, and I need that support. Also, I suspect ZFS would have challenged my old 32-bit processor, and there just wasn't a software RAID striping solution that didn't scare me. Speed was not the real objective for this system.

The MPS driver is supposed to support an LSI9210-8i (IT)-flashed M1015, but it didn't. I had checked and to the best of my ability had determined that the MPS driver was indeed available, but the OS did not recognize the need to attach it to this card, and I couldn't figure out how to nudge it to that conclusion. I thought it was maybe that the motherboard was reserving this PCI-e slot for a graphics card, but it worked in Windows and it works in Linux. I had a bunch of things I was going to try if unRAID didn't work, and I still might come back and try it if it doesn't work out.

Rick "appreciative" Denney