[SOLVED] Guide to flashing m1015 to an LSI SAS2008

[oblytr8]

I have been using NAS4Free for about 6 months, and have been very happy with it. Recently I had my USB drive running the OS die, and had to rebuild the system. During the build I upgraded to the newest release. Since then I have noticed a few issues.

I am running this on a Dell PowerEdge CS24-SC using dual Intel Xeon L5420 2.5Ghz quad core processors, and 16GB of RAM. I've also installed an IBM M1015 for expansion.

When in the GUI, any time I click on "Status -> Disks" it hangs the gui, and kills the CIFS share for the machine I am launching the GUI from. When I get to the log of the system, I see a string of these errors....

Jun 19 13:08:02 nas4free kernel: mpt0: completing timedout/aborted req 0xffffff8001537b50:63643
Jun 19 13:08:02 nas4free kernel: mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0x80
Jun 19 13:08:02 nas4free kernel: mpt0: mpt_recover_commands: abort timed-out. Resetting controller
Jun 19 13:08:02 nas4free kernel: mpt0: mpt_wait_req(1) timed out
Jun 19 13:08:02 nas4free kernel: mpt0: attempting to abort req 0xffffff8001537b50:63643 function 0
Jun 19 13:08:02 nas4free kernel: mpt0: request 0xffffff8001537b50:63643 timed out for ccb 0xfffffe0017e77000 (req->ccb 0xfffffe0017e77000)
Jun 19 13:07:37 nas4free kernel: mpt0: completing timedout/aborted req 0xffffff800152f840:59999
Jun 19 13:07:37 nas4free kernel: mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0x80
Jun 19 13:07:37 nas4free kernel: mpt0: mpt_recover_commands: abort timed-out. Resetting controller
Jun 19 13:07:37 nas4free kernel: mpt0: mpt_wait_req(1) timed out

Eventually it recovers, but if I go to the same place in the GUI, it pukes again.

Any idea what could be causing this issue, or what it indicates? I am not Unix or Linux guy at all. My knowledge of both is fairly minimal. If I am in the world of a GUI I am ok, put me at a CLI, and Im lost to the command structure.

I have noticed that during this issue, CIFS shares work fine for other machines on the network, just not from the machine I have the GUI launched.

[b0ssman]

what version of the m1015 firmware did you install?
anything before p13 is not recommended.

[oblytr8]

I'm not sure what version of firmware it is running. Ive just been running the firmware that was on it when I purchased the card. I recall watching the release date on the firmware as the machine booted earlier to see if it was ancient, and the version was released in April of 2012. I went to IBMs website to find the latest firmware, released in May of this year, but I havent a clue how to get it flashed with NAS4Free as the OS. I went to the controller BIOS, looking for an option there, but it was all config options pertaining to the RAID features.

[b0ssman]

if you are using the original m1015 firmware then you havent flashed the controller to it mode.
the it mode is the mode you want for zfs

Guide to flashing the m1015 to an lsi SAS2008
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index. ... #msg121131

[oblytr8]

Thanks for the help b0ssman. I cross flashed it to an lsi SAS2008 in IT mode, then brought it up to P15. Since so much more information is now being passed through to the OS, I had to completely rebuild my config. Everything seems to be rockin right along though. I haven't noticed any hiccups or hangs. All is right the world again.

[Onichan]

It is recommended to keep it in IT mode. Anyways for anybody else that wants to flash it I had some problems back when I was trying to do it as my MOBO has the new UEFI and that guide was a bit old. I actually created a zip with a couple different versions of the efi file to flash using newer MOBO's. Also included the updated P14 flash. I uploaded it:

LSI MegaRAID to SAS2008(P14).7z
https://mega.co.nz/#!sF0w1LqC!NGE9gSF9s ... c305_0ugHE

[Xylinx]

If you are using the ASUS P8Z77 MB use UEFI not dos. Chances are you will get a "Failed to initialize PAL" error when flashing the card to IT mode...

I will provide more information later...

[foxdoismil]

I am getting the "Failed to initialize PAL" mentioned above.
Questions:
1) As the motherboard does not have an EFI shell option, (but it is UEFi compatible), I am not able to open an UEFI shell. Can you provide instructions to create and open the EFI shell?
2) Will the "Installer_P17_for_Linux" or "Installer_P17_for_FreeBSD" that we can download from the lsi.com web site work correctly or will they also show the same "Failed to initialize PAL" error?
3) Is it mandatory to install any driver before running sas2flash for FreeBSD or Linux?

Onichan: I can't get the file you have uploaded. Are you able to re-upload?

Edit: Questions 2 and 3 are now irrelevant as flashing from the UEFI shell (or DOS shell for Motherboards without dual BIOS/UEFI) is the easiest way to do it.
I have an important answer from lsi.com support: Only the DOS and EFI sas2flash utilities work to flash from IR firmware to IT firmware.

[Onichan]

The upload still works for me, but I have uploaded it to MediaFire as well http://www.mediafire.com/download/febd6 ... 08(P14).7z

Also the way I booted to EFI shell was just putting the shellx64.efi in my zip on a thumb drive then in BIOS there was an option to boot to EFI.

To clear up the instructions a little more, only the flashing itself in EFI was not working for me. So in the zip there are 6 batch files that you run. Well you follow the readme and boot normal dos to do steps 1-4. Then reboot into EFI to do the flashing. Also I had some weird issue when trying to flash my second card I right after step 4 i booted to efi and then trying to run sas2flash would give a error saying its not loaded but after booting to dos and running 5it.bat and it erroring out then going back to efi sas2flash worked. So if you have issues try that. Also the batch files wont run while in EFI so you will need to manually type and enter whats in them.
Plus when I booted into EFI I had to change the directory to the flash drive, it should say what it mapped it to for example fs0: