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

[Nate Lawson]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2003, Andrew Snow wrote:
> 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)

This problem was fixed last week by a commit by Paul Saab.  You can wait
for 5.2R or use -current.

> 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.

This is not the driver's fault but fdisk's.  I really hate FreeBSD's fdisk
and do not ever use it.

-Nate