Re: Broadcom AERO SAS adapter: JBOD personality bug

Hi Borja,

It’s a design decision and beyond the mrsas driver’s control. Please open a ticket to Broadcom support channel and they should be able to help on your queries.

Thanks,
Sumit

> On 19-Oct-2022, at 7:01 PM, Borja Marcos <borjam@sarenet.es> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Hope someone from Broadcom is still lurking here ;)
> 
> I have seen a problem with a new Broadcom Aero SAS adapter on FreeBSD. I first detected it on TruNAS 12 but the
> issue affects FreeBSD 13.1 as well.
> 
> The card came with RAID firmware installed (dealer fault, but with crazy delivery times now I am afraid we must swallow it)
> but fortunately it has “Personalities”. 
> 
> So, if I set it up in “JBOD personality” it does behave like a plain HBA. Good!
> 
> However, I have noticed a problem in the JBOD personality. I am not sure whether it is a firmware bug, a design error
> or  a problem with the mrsas driver although after a quick look at the source code I don’t think the driver can
> solve this.
> 
> After a disk failure (for example, pulling a disk from the backplane) the controller will mark it as
> UNCONFIGURED BAD. Which is a dead end that may require a system reboot or at least using a tool such as
> StorCli (if it is possible, I haven’t verified that yet).
> 
> If this is a design decision I THINK THIS IS A MISTAKE. If the JBOD personality is equivalent to an HBA (it should
> be!) the controller firmware should not interfere with decisions made by the operating system itself.
> 
> As for the mrsas driver, I am not sure, is there a possibility to add a tunable so that can ignore the “unconfigured badness”
> and proceed? 
> 
> The controller is a Broadcom AERO 10E2
> Firmware: 5.180.02-2512
> NVDATA version: 5.1800.21-0642
> 
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Borja Marcos.
> 
>