Management interface for cards powered by the "mfi" driver?

[Karl Denninger]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 08:20:53PM -0500, Karl Denninger wrote:
> On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 10:30:01AM +0100, Pete French wrote:
> > > I assume SCSI is the best path forward (either SA/SCSI or traditional) but
> > > have been out of the loop on the card(s) that work properly for a good long
> > > while.
> > 
> > HP P400 cards are PCI express and SAS - they work very well under FreeBSD.
> > I've also used the cheaper E200 and that appears to be fine too, though I
> > havent run it for as long as the 400's.
> > 
> > http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/smartarrayp400/index.html
> > 
> > -pete.
> > 
> 
> Following upon my own stuff, I just laid hands on a Quad-Xeon machine with an
> Intel SRCSAS18E card in it, and well, the only way I can describe it is "oh
> my GOD!"
> 
> Off a couple of older 250GB SATA drives, mirrored, it sustained 70MB/sec over
> the entire disk's volume space on reads and had ZERO visible impact on CPU
> OR another process doing mixed I/O at the same time (!).
> 
> That's impressive.
> 
> If its stable.
> 
> The cards are not cheap, however.
> 
> The only "gotcha" is that all configuration of the drive(s) appears to be
> done through the controller.  I assume I COULD use something like gmirror,
> but see little reason to do so.
> 
> -- Karl Denninger
> karl at denninger.net

Ok, another followup!

Is there a mangement interface program for the "mfi" driver somewhere?  I
rooted around in "ports" but didn't find one, nor on the base system.

The Linux ones want to talk to the "amr" driver which is the older LSI Logic
MegaRAID boards, not the newer ones that the mfi driver talks to.

No management tool = el-sucko, because you can't rebuild a failed disk or
even shut the alarm on the board off!

-- Karl Denninger
karl at denninger.net