Testing new mpr driver

[Kenneth D. Merry]

On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 09:24:06 -0400, Douglas Gilbert wrote:
> On 14-05-07 04:59 AM, Borja Marcos wrote:
> >
> >Hi
> >
> >I just saw that there's a new driver for LSI3008 SAS3 cards. I have 
> >updated a test system to -STABLE, installed one of those cards (in this 
> >case, the OEM version sold by IBM as a HBA, with IT firmware).
> >
> >mpr0: <LSI SAS3008> port 0x3f00-0x3fff mem 0x912f0000-0x912fffff irq 32 at 
> >device 0.0 on pci17
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >Excellent so far I have noticed a difference with the mps based LSI2008 
> >cards: in the same hardware configuration as my previous tests (except, of 
> >course, the HBA) it seems to be faster. And I am using just one cable to 
> >connect the HBA to the backplane instead of two, I didn't have another 
> >cable available.
> >
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 25 lun 0 (pass0,da0)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 26 lun 0 (pass1,da1)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 27 lun 0 (pass2,da2)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 28 lun 0 (pass3,da3)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 29 lun 0 (pass4,da4)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 30 lun 0 (pass5,da5)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 33 lun 0 (pass6,da6)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 34 lun 0 (pass7,da7)
> ><ATA Samsung SSD 840 BB0Q>         at scbus0 target 35 lun 0 (pass8,da8)
> ><IBM-ESXS SAS EXP BP 61A6>         at scbus0 target 263 lun 0 (pass9,ses0)
> ><IBM-ESXS SAS EXP BP 61A6>         at scbus0 target 288 lun 0 (pass10,ses1)
> >
> >I have created a ZFS pool with the SSDs. With the LSI2008 based card I 
> >needed to run several bonnie++ instances in parallel in order to saturate 
> >the I/O bandwidth, and with this card a single instance reaches peak 
> >performance.
> >
> >Does it make sense at all?
> >
> >I assume that the driver could be considered almost production ready. Is 
> >it going to be included in 9.3 as well, as the manpage states, or is it a 
> >typo?
> 
> I'm keen to try the mpr driver and have LSI 9300-4i/4i4e
> HBAs plus a 12 Gbps SSD and SAS-2 bits to test with it.
> [Free-standing SAS-3 expanders are not common (but Areca just
> released one).]
> 
> My FreeBSD system is at 10.0-RELEASE-p2 and moving it to
> -STABLE looks like a fair amount of pain. Further I can see
> nothing on the FreeBSD site about the mpr driver. Could you
> supply links to any information about this driver? Is it
> likely to appear in 10.0-RELEASE-p? any time soon?

The -p releases are generally used for patching security vulnerabilities, I
believe.  If you'd rather not do a buildworld and installworld to upgrade
from source, you can also install a FreeBSD snapshot of stable/10 once one
is available with the driver.

You'll want one that is r265388 or newer.  There are snapshots here:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/10.0/

The driver is the same driver as the one LSI has had on their web site,
with the recent fixes from the mps(4) 6Gb driver applied.

The mpr(4) driver is essentially the same driver as mps(4), but with 12Gb
support added, WarpDrive support removed and the S/G list support changed
for the new hardware.

It is a separate driver to reduce the testing load on LSI for new driver
releases.

> FreeBSD is seriously lacking in the SAS-3 area compared to
> some other OSes. As SATA SSDs are strangled by their 6 Gbps
> (single port) interface, several new SAS 12 Gbps (SAS-3)
> products have appeared in the last month or so, with more
> to follow.

Hopefully this will start to get better.  We've just added a committer
from LSI (Steve McConnell), so LSI will be able to maintain their drivers
directly in the tree instead of going through other folks (like me) who
have varying amounts of bandwidth to help.

Ken
-- 
Kenneth Merry
ken at FreeBSD.ORG