ciss(4) HP Smart Array P840

[Jonathon Reinhart]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 12:24 PM, Sean Bruno <sbruno at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 11/19/15 09:03, Jonathon Reinhart wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> TL;DR: Why isn't the P840 supported by ciss(4)?
>>
> I think I was the last person actively maintaining this driver for an
> employer.  HP doesn't have staff to do this support any longer and I
> no longer work/have this hardware.
>
> That's pretty much it as far as I can tell with this product line.
> Someone has to put in the effort to get farther along with the hardware.
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> ciss(4) has "scsi-like" features which mean that behavior like this is
> kind of expected.
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Yup.  I was asked to add that almost 3 years ago by HP before their
> team and my employment ended.
>
>> 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
>
>
> I'm more than willing to help out here, you might want to push on HP
> if possible to get someone to reach out to me with details on what
> needs to be modified to support this controller.  I no longer have
> valid contacts to get this information.  :-(
>
> sean
>
> bcc jonathon

Thanks for the quick reply, Sean.

I took a quick look at the Linux hpsa driver (which obsoletes cciss)
to see if they treat these new cards any differently, and they don't
appear to do so, at all. AFAICT every supported board uses the same
"SA5_access" method. Which makes me again wonder why, given the
FreeBSD driver has the right VID/DID, it doesn't *just work*. I'd
probably have to turn on CISS debugging to see if there's any useful
info.

Unfortunately I don't have the time to do this right now; I just
thought I'd see if there was some simple fix I was missing.

I don't really have any contacts at HP to push on.  You may be able to
look at linux/drivers/scsi/hpsa.c for more info. I'm not sure how
FreeBSD / Linux sharing works. The code says:

Copyright 2014-2015 PMC-Sierra, Inc.
Copyright 2000,2009-2015 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
Questions/Comments/Bugfixes to storagedev at pmcs.com

Perhaps you could contact that email address.

Jonathon