How to check storage driver currently in use? mrsas or mpt?

[M H]

Hello FreeNAS gurus, I have a question that I can't seem to answer via search.

I have a new Dell R530 and a PERC H330 controller in HBA mode and 8 x 4TB WD Red Pro drives. To use the H330, I had to force FreeNAS to use the mrsas driver by editing the device.hints file. This had been working great for months, but there were several warnings on the forums that the mrsas drivers were not as reliable as the mpt drivers. My OCD took over and I sniped a Dell HBA330 on ebay for $35.

Now, I would like to undo my modifications to my device.hints file so that if there is ever an update, I don't lose that change and as a consequence, my pool, but I'm not sure what driver is currently being used with the HBA330. I swapped in the HBA330 and everything booted and pools mounted without skipping a beat. I can see on boot that is does mention the MPT firmware and presents the drive list in a completely different way than the H330, or even H730.

So my question is, how can I check what storage controller driver is currently in use? mrsas or mpt?

Thanks for your help, you guys rock!

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

From the CLI, do a dmesg -a | more and look and see what devices are loaded. It should also indicate the controller to which drives are attached when it discovers them.

 

[M H]

From the CLI, do a dmesg -a | more and look and see what devices are loaded. It should also indicate the controller to which drives are attached when it discovers them.

This is a great tip. This is what I see, unfortunately, I don't know what the H330 showed as before swapping in the HBA330.

Code:

mpr0: <Avago Technologies (LSI) SAS3008> port 0x2000-0x20ff mem 0x91d00000-0x91d0ffff,0x91c00000-0x91cfffff irq 26 at device 0.0 on pci1
mpr0: IOCFacts  :
		MsgVersion: 0x205
		HeaderVersion: 0x2a00
		IOCNumber: 0
		IOCExceptions: 0x0
		MaxChainDepth: 128
		NumberOfPorts: 1
		RequestCredit: 9680
		ProductID: 0x2221
		IOCRequestFrameSize: 32
		MaxInitiators: 0
		MaxTargets: 544
		MaxSasExpanders: 125
		MaxEnclosures: 126
		HighPriorityCredit: 124
		MaxReplyDescriptorPostQueueDepth: 65504
		ReplyFrameSize: 32
		MaxVolumes: 0
		MaxDevHandle: 677
		MaxPersistentEntries: 240
mpr0: Firmware: 13.00.00.00, Driver: 15.01.00.00-fbsd
mpr0: IOCCapabilities: 7a85c<ScsiTaskFull,DiagTrace,SnapBuf,EEDP,TransRetry,EventReplay,MSIXIndex,HostDisc>

Let's say that I remove the mrsas3.enable argument from device.hints and my pools disappear, I should just be able to readd the argument and reboot correct? No permanent damage?

 

[Johnnie Black]

mpr is the correct driver.

mpr - LSI Fusion-MPT 3 IT/IR 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI/SATA driver
mps - LSI Fusion-MPT 2 IT/IR 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI/SATA driver
mpt - LSI Fusion-MPT SCSI/Fibre Channel driver
mrsas - LSI MegaRAID 6Gb/s and 12Gb/s SAS+SATA RAID controller driver

 

[M H]

mpr is the correct driver.

mpr - LSI Fusion-MPT 3 IT/IR 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI/SATA driver
mps - LSI Fusion-MPT 2 IT/IR 6Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI/SATA driver
mpt - LSI Fusion-MPT SCSI/Fibre Channel driver
mrsas - LSI MegaRAID 6Gb/s and 12Gb/s SAS+SATA RAID controller driver

That's outstanding news! Totally worth lurking ebay for a HBA330 ($35 no less). So for anyone that had the same question I did, YES, there IS a difference between a H330 in HBA mode and a HBA330 even though they are physically identical and the online documentation makes no reference of IT mode on the HBA330. Thanks for all the help guys.