Support for HP SmaryArray P408i RAID controller

Dadoo

We're trying to install pfSense on an HP DL360 G10 with a SmaryArray P408i RAID controller, and pfSense is saying it can't see the array. The Googling I've done gives me the impression this controller isn't supported, yet (on pfSense or FreeBSD). Can anyone confirm or deny that? If it's not supported, does anyone know when it will be?

stephenw10

It looks like there may be a driver but it's not included in the FreeBSD kernel. Might not be opensource.

Can you get the PCI IDs for it?

Steve

Dadoo

The pciconf output says:

none94@pci0:177:0:0:    class=0x010700 card=0x0602103c chip=0x028f9005 rev=0x01 hdr=0x00
    vendor = 'Adaptec'
    class = mass storage
    subclass = SAS

It seems odd that there's only one mass storage controller (there are two sets of SAS ports), but that's all pciconf is giving me.

stephenw10

Ok, so might be supported by the smartpqi driver:

vendor: 9005 ("Adaptec"), device: 028f ("Smart Storage PQI 12G SAS/PCIe 3"), subvendor: 103c, subdevice: 0602 ("Smart Array P408i-a SR Gen10")

For which there is a FreeBSD 11 kernel module available:
https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/speed/raid/aac/unix/smartpqi_freebsd_v1.0.1-239_tgz.php

However that's not open-source so it's never going to be included by default. It might be easier to ignore that controller completely in my opinion.

Steve

Dadoo

That's going to be tough: the cables going to the hard drives look like they're proprietary and, at the very least, are the exact length needed to get to the existing controller. Connecting them to a PCIe controller might not be possible. I'll have to see what we can do.

If I were to use the closed-source driver, would that affect updates, i.e. would we need to do something like rebuild the kernel, every time we needed to update the system?

stephenw10

It may be possible to load that kernel module into pfSense. It may only load against their custom kernel. Try it and see.

Since it's binary only there's no way to rebuild a pfSense kernel with it included.

Any pfSense firmware update that changes the kernel could potentially break it. It's likely to be a nightmare IMO. :-\

It seems odd that it's opensource in Linux though….

Steve