Support for Plextor PCI-E M6e SSD cards

[nick6]

First off, thank you for an excellent product, I have been using pre-iXsystems FreeNAS and now NAS4Free for several years now and it has never let me down.

I recently built up a new box to run NAS4Free:
Version 9.2.0.1 - Shigawire (revision 972)
Build date Mon Apr 28 02:37:05 CEST 2014
Platform OS FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE-p4 (kern.osreldate: 902001)
Platform x64-embedded on Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1246 v3 @ 3.50GHz
System Supermicro X10SAT
RAM 32 GB ECC Unbuffered Crucial DDR3-1600 (4x8GB)
Disks 6x WD Red 3 TB drives (one RAIDZ2 vdev in a single pool)
SSD 2x Plextor PX-AG128M6e PCI-E 128GB

Which brings me to my issue. I had bought the pair of SSDs, because of their performance levels (unrestricted by a SATA3 bottleneck) to use as a mirrored SLOG device, but found that they are not supported in NAS4Free, with the following error showing in dmesg:

Code: Select all

(aprobe0:ahcich0:0:0:0): Unexpected signature 0xffff
(aprobe1:ahcich1:0:0:0): Unexpected signature 0xffff

There are patches to both FreeBSD and FreeNAS which allow these devices to work (according to the bug trackers, I haven't actually tried either OS image):
FreeBSD Bug 190050
FreeNAS Bug 5909

As FreeBSD 9.2.1.8 is supposed to contain this patch, can this patch be incorporated into a new NAS4Free release? Possibly (if it is planned) the one that contains the ShellShock fix?

[b0ssman]

you could try the unofficial builds with freebsd 10.1.

viewtopic.php?f=69&t=5365

[nick6]

I tested one of the FreeBSD 10.1RC-based builds.

The SSDs were recognized. I was able to import the pool and ensure the change to drive enumeration wouldn't cause two HDs in the pool to go "missing" - 10.1 seems to use device IDs rather than /dev/adaX. This is good, since my HDs are /dev/ada0 through /dev/ada5 in 9.2, but in 10.1RC the SSDs "took over" /dev/ada0 and /dev/ada1, bumping my drives to /dev/ada2 through /dev/ada7.

So now I just have to wait until FreeBSD 10.1 is officially released, and a N4F version based on 10.1 is released, and I'll have use of my SSDs.

[wingenieur]

Hi!

I recently got a Plextor SSD as well and want to use it as boot drive for a full installation, to speed up booting, swapping (if any), building media database and compiling sources.
With the beta builds (10.1 build 303) the SSD is recognized, but the VirtualBox installer doesn't work.

So is it possible to use the modified AHCI-driver in the next 9.3 release? Here's the source:
http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/ah ... =FREEBSD10

That would be great!