Configuration : Boot drive on SATA, other drives on LSI 3008 8i SAS in JBOD, boot ROM disabled. The mpii driver gets very upset (causes a kernel panic on boot, even though the boot drive is on SATA [1]) if some of the drive bays aren't occupied, throws unhappy messages about drives disappearing from bays, and generally doesn't provide any confidence that I could ever remove a drive from a running system and have it work.
I have an end goal of setting up a mirrored NetBSD root partition (Raidframe as there is no other option), and then fault tolerant ZFS for other storage. Is there a viable configuration with an external SAS controller? I do note that mpii(4) says 'The chips supported by mpii do not use a SCSI-like identifier. Instead they use an opaque ID and leave discovery order up to the operating system. The code to handle this is currently not implemented and therefore it is not a good idea to run this driver on a multi-boot machine' I take it from this that things like disk swapping and re-ordering are just likely to result in extreme pain for mpii. Is there an SAS controller (preferably 12Gb/s) that supports the disks in JBOD, and will work if disks are removed? My fallback position is to use SATA for everything for now, but I'd rather not. [1] Yes, I did try with the SAS ROM set to Boot support, and the boot drive on the SAS controller. This generally leads to more pain, and again if disks are removed/moved (not the boot disk), can lead to kernel panics even though the boot disk has not physically moved. Yes, the SATA controller was still enabled, it needs to be as I'm using more than 8 disks. Cheers!
