[CentOS] Supermicro Adaptec AIC-9410 HostRAID controller

[Kurt Newman]

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1) Has anyone been able to get their AIC-9410 controller recognized in
CentOS 5.3?

I'm working with a Supermicro X7DBR-3 motherboard.  It has 2 ICH Raid
Codebase options in the Bios (Intel and Adaptec); neither of which seem
to change Linux's behavior.  The interesting part though, choosing
either Adaptec or Intel, then performing an 'lspci' always displays
Intel Corp 631xESP/632xESP SATA RAID Controller (rev 09).

I've seen several people post on a variety of mailing lists (typically
using older CentOS revisions), but it doesn't appear many were
successful.  It seems most swap to software raid.

2) When using this internal host raid controller, shouldn't the raided
devices appear as a single device like other traditional scsi controllers?

Regardless of the raid options I choose, Linux still continues to see
both drives (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb).  Is this a function of being
'HostRAID'?

3) If you've been able to get it to work, which driver did you use?

Thus far, I've tried 2 drivers.

1st driver: adpahci -- Unsuccessful

I downloaded it from supermicro's website.
ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/Adaptec_ESB2/Linux/Redhat/adpahci.rhel5.i686.img

After successfully loading the image and inserting the module using
kickstart, nothing useful happens, other than several /sys entries
added.  (NOTE: I had to change the internal cpio archive pathing from
`2.6.18-8.el5' to `2.6.18-128.el5').

2nd driver: aic94xx -- Unsuccessful

The driver is built-in via a patch to the Redhat stock kernel.

Other than saying that it's loaded, it also does nothing useful outside
of /sys entries.  Several mailing lists and documents pointed to using
the 'attach_HostRAID' option, however, it doesn't exist.  Using this
option with `insmod' (or modprobe) fails.

3rd driver: adp94xx -- In the works

I downloaded this driver from Adaptec's website:
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/speed/sas/linux/adp94xx-1_0_8-12_src_tgz.htm

So far, I'm not able to get it to compile because I'm trying to create a
patch file so that it incorporates all of the contents of the tarball.

Any ideas on where to go from here?  I'd really like to avoid software raid.

Thanks,
Kurt
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Re: [CentOS] Supermicro Adaptec AIC-9410 HostRAID controller

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009, nate wrote:
Kurt Newman wrote:
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 1) Has anyone been able to get their AIC-9410 controller recognized in
 CentOS 5.3?
 [..]
 Any ideas on where to go from here?  I'd really like to avoid software raid.

Get a better RAID controller, from the looks of things that looks to
be one of those cheap shit software RAID controllers that depend on
the drivers to do most of the work. Supermicro last I checked at
least didn't have any boards that had good RAID controllers on
them, even their zero channel controllers while I'm sure are probably
higher grade then the on board controller still look poor by comparison.

I'll second that.  I have a 2U Supermicro box with a X5DPL-TGM
main board and Adaptec AIC-8120 on-board controller.  CentOS 5.x
works fine with the individual drives BIOS configured as JBOD
devices, leaving any RAID to Linux software.

We have another 1U Supermicro box with a H8DAR-T main board.
This has an Adaptec AIC-8130, but that's disabled in favor of a
3ware controller which does Real Raid(tm).

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   b...@celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:  (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
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