ciss(4) HP Smart Array P840

[Jonathon Reinhart]

Hello all,

TL;DR: Why isn't the P840 supported by ciss(4)?


I tried to setup FreeNAS 9.3 (running 9.3-RELEASE-p25) on an HP DL380
Gen9, with the P840 RAID controller. I didn't realize that the P840 is
not officially supported by the ciss(4) driver. In my troubleshooting,
I ended up in the same place as documented on this forums.freenas.org
post <https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/hp-gen9-server-w-p840-hba-mode-no-drives-visible.28620/>:

> It's interesting that camcontrol devlist shows the drives, but there are no da* or ada* designations for them. I don't know what that means, but I'd speculate it's something driver-related.

Indeed:

    # camcontrol devlist -v
    scbus0 on ciss0 bus 0:
    scbus1 on ciss0 bus 32:
    <ATA ST1000DM003-1ER1 CC46>        at scbus1 target 4 lun 0 (pass0)
    <ATA ST1000DM003-1ER1 CC46>        at scbus1 target 5 lun 0 (pass1)
    scbus2 on ciss0 bus 33:
    ...

But there are no device names listed there, after passX, or in /dev.

I see in the ciss source
(https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blame/master/sys/dev/ciss/ciss.c#L320)
that the VID/DID for this card (0x103C, 0x3239) is listed.

I'm new to FreeBSD, but I'm confused as to how the driver supports
this card enough to read the drive model numbers, but not enough to
actually use the drives. Is there something I'm missing, or is there
some other technical reason this controller can't be used?

Thank you for your time,

Jonathon Reinhart