LSI MegaRAID with 8TB 4kn drives problem

[Paul Esson]

Hi Valeri,

I had similar issue with Dell PERC 730 which is OEM of LSI card and 6TB 4Kn drives.  In my case I had to force the use of the MRSAS driver over MFI initially by exiting the boot sequence to loader prompt and typing:

set hw.mfi.mrsas_enable=1

Thereafter I added the line " hw.mfi.mrsas_enable=1" to /boot/loader.conf" after I had installed the OS.

Regards, 

Paul Esson  |  Redstor Limited
t  +44 (0)118 951 5235  |   m  +44 (0)776 690 6514
e  paul.esson at redstor.com
www.redstor.com




-----Original Message-----
From: Valeri Galtsev [mailto:galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu] 
Sent: 31 May 2016 22:13
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: LSI MegaRAID with 8TB 4kn drives problem

Dear All,

Does anybody have LSI MegaRAID (Avago, not LSI, I should have said) with 8TB 4kn drives working on the machine running FreeBSD? If yes, how did you install system on that machine?

My problem is: when I boot from FreeBSD DVD the machine that has LSI MegaRAID card (MegaRAID SAS 9271-8i) with 8TB 4Kn (HGST He) the boot sequence gets stuck after launching CPUs loading USB (and discovering keyboard/mouse). After that the machine doesn't respond to keystrokes and keeps printing messages:

mfi0: COMMAND oxfffffe0000e56cc0 TIMEOUT AFTER 56 SECONDS

(and it keeps printing these lines with increasing numbers of seconds).
This sounds like it is getting stuck when loading mfi driver for LSI controller. I flashed the latest firmware one cane get from AvagoTech website for this controller. This sounds similar to the known bug in mfi kernel module that was fixed in FreeBSD 9.1. Still, if I try to boot DVD with latest FreeBSD 10.3, or older: 10.1, 9.3, I have this problem. If I disconnect all drives, or connect older smaller drives with 512 byte block size, all goes well, and I am able to boot the machine from FreeBSD installation DVD. Also, I can boot Linux from DVD without problem with 4Kn drives attached, but you can imagine I will not be happy to have to install Linux instead of FreeBSD.


Does anybody have LSI MegaRAID with 8TB 4kn drives working on the machine running FreeBSD?

Any advises what else I could try before submit bug report?

Thanks a lot for all your answers!

Valeri

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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