ciss(4) HP Smart Array P840

[Jonathon Reinhart]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 5:56 PM, Sean Bruno <sbruno at freebsd.org> wrote:
>>  fcae8e0 Appears to be the winner here, adding JBOD / HBA mode
>> support.
>
> If you're happy with the results, I can totally do the merge back to
> stable/9 for you.  But does that actually help you out here?
>
> sean

I was able to re-build FreeNAS 9.3 with the patches, and see that the
disks were assigned da* names. As far as I could tell, the patches
worked.

However, I was seeing periodic messages from the kernel which repeat
every ~minute for all 4 drives installed:

    ciss0: *** Physical drive failure, Port=1I Box=1 Bay=1 reason=0x43
    ciss0: *** Physical drive failure, Port=1I Box=1 Bay=2 reason=0x43
    ciss0: *** Physical drive failure, Port=1I Box=1 Bay=3 reason=0x43
    ciss0: *** Physical drive failure, Port=1I Box=1 Bay=4 reason=0x43

This appears to be printed from ciss_notify_complete(), and the error
message actually comes from the card:

    /*
    * If the adapter gave us a text message, print it.
    */
    if (cn->message[0] != 0)
        ciss_printf(sc, "*** %.80s\n", cn->message);

I confirmed (by running strings on the firmware image) that it is
indeed the card generating this message. HP tech support would lead
one to believe otherwise, but they also asked if FreeBSD was
Linux-based, so take that for what it's worth.

I was unable to determine what reason=0x43 meant.  The only clue I had
was that the HP Smart Storage Administrator told me that my 4Kn drives
were unsupported and unavailable for configuration. I wouldn't imagine
this would matter, considering the card was in HBA mode.

Nonetheless, I wasn't about to put a machine in production with
"Physical drive failure" messages being spewed, red-herring or not. So
I've let this project go for now.

If anyone trying to install FreeNAS on an HP server finds this, I'd be
willing to help in any way I could.

Thanks for the help,

Jonathon