sasflash removing BIOS on older 1068/e cards

[trekuhl]

Familiar with using sas2flash util on the newer 2008 based lsi cards and i typically erase the card and load firmware only to speed up reboot times for the occasional update.

my google foo and forum searching is coming up weaksauce. also perused the lsi sasflash manual with all the commands but not seeing much mention of loading firmware only on those cards. have some dell5e and 6i hba/IT cards that work fine but if i can erase the bios portion would speed up boot times for sure on some older systems I have.

 

[dlavigne]

What is the question exactly?

 

[trekuhl]

erase bios; load fw only. increase boot time significantly on older hp g5 servers since bios does not need to detect all the drives. problem resolved, pretty much same as sas2flash commands.

can sasflash -o -e 6 (and -c # card) to erase all but manufacturing. or even more simply just sasflash -o -e 5 to erase BIOS only as older 1068x cards i had needed then to concat the FW file and i didnt have the right dat file.

also with the older cards can load FW (say p21) other than p16 and it doesnt throw error in freenas 9.3 about fw mismatch, so either checks arent used on anything older than sas2008 or perhaps its not applicable on these older cards.

 

[sfcredfox]

this may not be exactly what you want, but i turned off rom options in the bios for those pci slots. they dont get a chance to use their bios anymore, boots much faster, but didnt have to erase the card.

 

[Ericloewe]

this may not be exactly what you want, but i turned off rom options in the bios for those pci slots. they dont get a chance to use their bios anymore, boots much faster, but didnt have to erase the card.

This is a valid workaround, but the BIOS must support it (disabling support for legacy BIOS extension ROMs should also work).

If sasflash uses the same commands as sas2flash, it should be as simple as wiping the card and not writing the BIOS extension.

 

[DJABE]

You only need to erase the card first with usual sasflash -o -e 6. Then simply omit -b option for BIOS during flashing process.

Caveat: that's only possible via DOS and UEFI. DOS boot usually does not work on 10+ year old/new systems, so the only option left is UEFI. The hard part is that UEFI version is almost impossible to find these days due to LSI being literally gone from the market with Avago and then Broadcom. Thus, I provide the only link and version which worked for me to flash mine LSI SAS3081E-R cards based on 1068E chipset.

EFI version alongside latest IT firmware in one zip found at:
http://www.thomas-krenn.com/en/download.html?manufacturer=15&category=10&product=7519

Note: disabling OpROM in BIOS might sound as a workaround - but some cards will simply load their BIOS and shitware in the background thus effectively maxing boot speed to 3-5 minutes during which 1st BIOS/POST screen is freezed. For instance Fujitsu D2607 (SAS2008 chipset) and others with their own BIOS/firmware will behave like that.


Hope this helps owners of this still great card for mechanical disks (SATAII speeds only, max 2 TB drive size support).

 

[Ericloewe]

The hard part is that UEFI version is almost impossible to find these days due to LSI being literally gone from the market with Avago and then Broadco

The domain name might say Broadcom, but the old files are still there.

 

[DJABE]

Well, they don't even list LSI SAS2008 cards any longer, not to mention those 10+ yrs old 1068E chips. So if you were able to find those files on broadcom site, it would be very helpful for the community to post them somewhere (at least in this topic for concerning 1068E chipset).

 

[Johnnie Black]

Well, they don't even list LSI SAS2008 cards any longer, not to mention those 10+ yrs old 1068E chips. So if you were able to find those files on broadcom site, it would be very helpful for the community to post them somewhere (at least in this topic for concerning 1068E chipset).

They are still there, under legacy products.

 

[Ericloewe]

Well, they don't even list LSI SAS2008 cards any longer

For some reason, they only show the 9210 at the moment. That's fine, they're all basically the same.

https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9210-8i#overview