Dell EMC Boss on R7425

[Peter Eriksson]

Hi!

On Fri Jul 19 11:55:43 UTC 2019 you wrote about problems with FreeBSD 11.3 and the Dell EMC BOSS-S1 controller on the Freebsd-Hardware mailing list:

> I'm trying to see the NVME m.2 drives that are on a Dell R7425.  The UEFI/BIOS sees the controller and the M.2 drives on it.  The controller is BOSS-S1 (??)
> 
> I'm on FreeNAS running 11.3 of FreeBSD.
> I don't see the controller in dmesg, pciconf, or camcontrol.  :(
> Does anyone know what the issue is? Is there no driver?  I read the forums and it seems that this was addressed back in 2017.  Regression?  Nothing in pciconf jumps out at me as being a disk controller.... (please point it out if you see it....)  Any other tools I can use to find this thing?


We’ve seen similar problems with FreeBSD not detecting it on our Dell R740xd servers - but it seems to be firmware-related.

With the original BOSS-S1 firmware (2.5.13-2008) it works. Also works with -2009. 

> # zpool status zroot
>   pool: zroot
>  state: ONLINE
>   scan: resilvered 967M in 0 days 00:00:15 with 0 errors on Thu Jan 16 14:41:21 2020
> config:
> 
> 	NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
> 	zroot       ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	  mirror-0  ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    ada0p4  ONLINE       0     0     0
> 	    ada1p4  ONLINE       0     0     0
> 
> errors: No known data errors


> ahci2: <Marvell 88SE9230 AHCI SATA controller> port 0x8028-0x802f,0x8034-0x8037,0x8020-0x8027,0x8030-0x8033,0x8000-0x801f mem 0xb8800000-0xb88007ff at device 0.0 numa-domain 0 on pci9
> ahci2: AHCI v1.20 with 3 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier not supported
> ahci2: quirks=0x900<NOBSYRES,ALTSIG>
> ahcich14: <AHCI channel> at channel 0 on ahci2
> ahcich15: <AHCI channel> at channel 1 on ahci2
> ahcich16: <AHCI channel> at channel 2 on ahci2
> ada0 at ahcich14 bus 0 scbus17 target 0 lun 0
> ada1 at ahcich15 bus 0 scbus18 target 0 lun 0



However, with the latest firmware - 2.5.13-3022 - the boot block is read, and then kernel is loaded but when ZFS is trying to mount the root pool it can’t detect any disks and the domes output doesn’t detect the disks.

I’m currently in the (slow) process of trying to figure out at what firmware level it stops working…

- Peter