Re: Areca 1882 SAS controller support?

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2012 at 10:59:50AM +0100, Hauke Fath wrote:
> All,
> 
> we are looking at getting a new fileserver, and the spec has an Areca 1882
> SAS controller - or would have, if there were NetBSD support for it. I
> added the PCI IDs, regenerated sys/dev/pci/pcidevs*.h, and the dealer ran
> the resulting netbsd-6 kernel, producing the attached dmesg.
> 
> The arcmsr0 shows up, but that's it - no attached disks. How hard would it
> be to add support, or should I look elsewhere? I haven't been too happy
> with LSI's support.

The Areca controllers are excellent and the NetBSD driver has always worked
well for me.  I don't have any of the SAS units (I have many of the SATA
units).  To my knowledge, Areca have kept the driver interface very, very
stable and there *shouldn't* be a problem with the 1882.

You might compare revisions of their FreeBSD driver from around the time
when the 16xx or 18xx SAS units came to market and see if there are any
relevant changes.

Here are three things you should check, though:

        1) Were the disks configured into a RAID volume?  JBOD is
           likely almost completely untested in the NetBSD arcmsr driver
           (and if the controller BIOS is in "RAID" rather than "JBOD"
           mode, the driver may need to do something special to make the
           disks probe as JBOD at all).

        2) Do the disks show up, in the same configuration, under FreeBSD
           or Linux?

        3) What happens if you swap the SAS disks for SATA disks?  Either
           should work with the 1882.

Thor