MFI and passthrough

[Borja Marcos]

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Hello,

I'm trying to set up a machine with FreeBSD 7, using ZFS, and I'm  
running into problems.

The machine is a Dell Poweredge 2950, and includes a PERC/5i card and  
six disks. As I'm using ZFS I don't
need the array functionality at all, and it's actually causing  
problems if I just create six logical volumes.

I have seen that there is a "mfip" device that works as a passthough,  
so I have tried to destroy the six
logical volumes I had created. Using the GENERIC kernel I had  
installed with the distribution (which includes
the mfi driver) I've loaded the mfip module from the boot command line.

After booting, a "camcontrol devlist" shows the six disks, but only  
as "passthrough devices". How can I make
them be attached as disks? I've tried to use the "da" driver (using  
device.hints) but I have been unsuccessful.

Unfortunately Dell doesn't sell a non-array option for this machine  
supporting 6 disks. The non-array option, which
I think is based on SATA, supports only four.

Any ideas? The PERC/5i plain sucks for this purpose. I tried to  
unplug one of the disks (remember that I have a separate
logical volume for each disk) and the card renumbered the rest of the  
logical disks, making the ZFS pool unusable until
I rebooted, erased the PERC config, and recreated the six logical  
volumes.


Thank you very much,








Borja.

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