Re: Working ZFS RAID/SAS controller support/mpii

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:20:33 +0100
Peter Kay <syllopsium%syllopsium.co.uk@localhost> wrote:

> Configuration : Boot drive on SATA, other drives on LSI 3008 8i SAS in
> JBOD, boot ROM disabled. The mpii driver gets very upset (causes a
> kernel panic on boot, even though the boot drive is on SATA [1]) if
> some of the drive bays aren't occupied, throws unhappy messages about
> drives disappearing from bays, and generally doesn't provide any
> confidence that I could ever remove a drive from a running system and
> have it work.

So the issue only happens when you remove drives from a live system? If
that's the case, the obvious workaround would be to power off the
system and then replace faulty drive.

I've used "LSI 9260-8i" on NetBSD, but it's 6Gb/s per port and no JBOD.
Not actually tried hotplugging with this card. The only issue with not
having JBOD is the virtual disc provided by the card doesn't support
SSD TRIM. The card has flexible config where you can disable cached
I/O, etc, so data is passed directly to SSD without getting slowed down
by onboard cache. I've not used ZFS with it, but I think configuring
each disk individually in RAID0 and then passing them to ZFS would work.

There is LSI binary Linux command line tool (MegaCli64), so I imagine
you could offline/online individual disks, but you'd need Linux
emulation packages setup on NetBSD.