A Penguin in Purple Clothing

Thursday September 30, 2004

No luck on the LSI SAS 1064

Yesterday, I wanted to test the status of hotplug under Linux. I had a beta board from LSI that is a Serial Access SCSI card. This is a PCI 3.3 volt board, so it didn't go into the 5 volt boards from Nvidia. I reinstalled an old Tyan system that was laying in pieces in the lab that has PCI-X 3.3 slots. I slapped Fedora Core 2 on there, latest kernel updates, but it didn't recognize the card. I figured it wouldn't because this is still early access silicon. So, I checked in the kernel for which driver might be close to work on this card.

The mpt driver is from LSI and is in drivers/message/fusion. I tried to load that driver, but it did not attach to the card. I figured I may need an even more up to date kernel. So, I compiled 2.6.9-rc2 and put that on there. No luck.

I decided I might have to dive into the driver, so I started to look at the code. Lo and behold, it was not attaching to PCI id 0x0050 which was the LSI card. I added in that, plus another line to identifiy the 1064 card in the kernel messages. Compiled, installed, and the driver attached! But, it did not see any drives.

This morning, I got an email from the LSI representative with the latest version of their driver, 3.02.04. I was using 3.01.16 which is the one in 2.6.9-rc2. I compiled this new driver and installed it. It attached without issue to the LSI card, but I *still* don't see any drives. Arg.

So, I still don't have the ability to test hotplug on this SAS card. Maybe I can get a better dialog going with the LSI engineers.

(2004-09-30 11:14:44.0) Permalink