ibm x345 w/ serveraid-5i + freebsd ips driver dramas

[Andrew Snow]

Hello,

Problem 1: (the annoying setback)

I cannot got the serveraid-5i card to work with FreeBSD 5.x (tried 
5.1-REL and the latest current.iso).  I am using the latest firmware and 
BIOS for the card from IBM (6.10.24).  While the card is detected while 
the kernel is booting, the drive sizes are incorrectly listed (current 
number, but they are listed as megabytes instead of bytes) and there is 
a kernel panic a short time later when (I think) it tries to initialise 
the card.

I its something to do with the fact that it is a "zero channel" card 
design which uses the on-board LSI-based controller (which works just 
fine with 5.1-REL).

Following the advice of someone on the mailing list, I tried booting 
from an IDE drive and then loading ips as a KLD.  This time it worked:

ips0: <IBM ServeRAID Adapter> mem 0xf4000000-0xf7ffffff irq 11 at device 
2.0 on pci8
ips0: logical drives: 1
ipsd0: <Logical Drive> on ips0
ipsd0: Logical Drive  (138860MB)

Problem 2: (the biggest problem)

While the drive size is reported correctly, the geometry is wrong...
472 cyls/254 heads/63 sectors = 7552944 sectors (3687MB) ?!

When setting the BIOS to "non-extended" (2GB max) support mode, freebsd 
then thinks this is the geometry:
1846 cyls/128 heads/32 sectors = 7561216 sectors (3692MB).

So I tested a few alternate geometries instead and even though there 
were no error messages, it seemed to get reset to what FreeBSD was 
reporting, no matter how many ways I tried to use the fdisk utility.



What is the status of development on this driver? Is there anything I 
can do to help out, before I send this card back?

Can anyone advise the best card to get that is comparable to the 
ServeRaid-5i in features, and that works properly with FreeBSD?


Kind regards,

Andrew