mps(4) driver (LSI 6Gb SAS) commited to stable/8

[Doug Ambrisko]

Josh Paetzel writes:
| On Saturday, February 19, 2011 07:30:08 am Martin Nilsson wrote:
| > >> Thank you Ken for getting this done. Any plan to support the LSI 9240
| > >> (skinny) cards? if its a matter of hardware to develop with, contact
| > >> me off list and I can provide you with a development system.
| > > 
| > > That'll be up to LSI most likely.
| > > 
| > > If it has the mpt2 interface, then I'm sure they'll support it through
| > > the mps driver.
| > > 
| > > If it has the MegaRAID interface, then the mfi driver would need to be
| > > modified.
| > 
| > It is the mfi interface and the driver at LSI:s web supports them, the
| > new driver should compile on both i386 and amd64 the previous one were
| > i386 only.
| > 
| > /Martin
| 
| The mfi driver on the LSI web page supports the 9240, whereas the stock 
| FreeBSD mfi driver does not.  The LSI driver breaks mfiutil however, so make 
| sure you have megacli or the like working.
| 
| Xin Li is looking at merging support for the 9240 into FreeBSD mfi, but the 
| two have diverged so it's not a slam-dunk.

You should have Xin have Scott and myself review changes.  However, LSI
sent me changes (a relative long time ago) to integrate.  I need to go
through them, test them and have them reviewed.  The version on their
web site had some concerns and I don't know if this card is one of them.
I should be getting back to doing some real FreeBSD work at work but been 
busy with other work.  There are a few things I need to get back into 
FreeBSD.  Hopefully LSI didn't give up on me.  Atleast iXsystems was
able to off-load some work for me via graid etc.  I've been helping
to get them to converge versus diverge.  However, what is put on their
web site can be an early version of work.  It's great that LSI is
supporting FreeBSD.  So far any LSI MegaRAID SAS card that I've tried
has worked.  I don't have all of them but might be able to get some
now from LSI.

It might be good in the future to convert mfiutil to use the LSI ioctl.
It should be fairly trivial to do our in-house tool uses the LSI ioctl.

Users need to understand that their SAS cards are different then their
RAID cards.  That can usually be figured out looking at Linux references.

Thanks,

Doug A.