[bmw]

Here's a cross-BSD question: Sun v20z boxes come with a built-in Ultra SCSI 320 interface and drive(s). An option, which I'm trying to use, is to configure two SCSI drives in RAID-1 (mirroring) on it.

Here's the rub: the FreeBSD mpt(4) driver borks this badly. It configures the first drive for Ultra but leaves the 2nd drive in 8-bit async mode so the array performance is awful.

So: has or does anyone here run another BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???BSD) on this kind of hardware with RAID-1 and is happy with it?

The chipset involved is an LSI Logic 53C1020. In FreeBSD this is handled by the mpt driver; in Open and Net it looks like similar drivers apply. I'm planning on inspecting the sources, but it'd be real nice if I could get a pointer to a driver that actually works. Apparently, this same LSI chipset is also used in some IBM servers as well as some Dell servers.

Thanks in advance!

[elmore]

We're using LSI cards on FreeBSD in some Dell equipment here, we're using the amr driver though.


amr0: <LSILogic MegaRAID> mem 0xfebf0000-0xfebfffff irq 120 at device 8.0 on pci8
amr0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
amr0: <LSILogic PERC 4/Di> Firmware 2.37, BIOS 1.05, 128MB RAM
amrd0: <LSILogic MegaRAID logical drive> on amr0
amrd0: 34678MB (71020544 sectors) RAID 1 (optimal)


I've run several bench tests on this box with both iozone and bonnie and gotten very good results. This is also the box that runs my internal mail gateway and the test utils that come with postfix ran exceptionally well.

I don't know enough to tell you if you could try and use the amr driver or not. What I do know is that I've been quite happy with it's performance.

I should mention this is running 5.3 btw. In case you couldn't tell by the big GIANT-LOCKED line in the dmesg.

[bmw]

However I think the LSI MegaRAID is based on a different chipset than the 53C1020. LSI Logic acquired the AMI division that made RAID controllers and sold those under the LSI name for a while (maybe still do?). But what I've got in the Sun is "MPT Fusion" hardware which I think is yet another LSI Logic acquisition. It's confusing as hell when you look at the *BSD release notes to see LSI Logic show up along with AMI and other brands they resell.

So what I'm saying is I don't think the amr driver would work with this box. :-(

But thanks! :-)

[bmw]

Late follow-up to this:

We eventually found that the v20z (and v40z) onboard controller is 100% crap. Nothing you can do with it. What you do instead is order the optional Sun X9269A MegaRAID PCI-X Card and ignore the built-in controller.

Life is good after that. The amr driver is used and disk performance is quite good.