Installing drivers for "unsupported" SAS HBA?

[schfiftyfive]

I'm trying to set up FreeNAS 8.0.4 in a SuperMicro server with an Areca ARC-1320 HBA. Areca has driver support (binaries) for FreeBSD 8.2. I have downloaded and installed the drivers, and the driver seems to load just fine and see the card. The DMESG output shows the driver loading, but I'm not seeing any drives showing up.

I guess my question is, do regular FreeBSD drivers work with FreeNAS, or is the kernel modified just enough that you need to recompile them specifically? I do have the drives attached to the HBA using an Areca ARC-8026 Expander box, and I'm using all off the shelf SATA drives. So is it an issue with the SAS expander?

Just to be sure I'm not having drive or card issues, I installed Windows on the same machine and the Areca drivers, and the drives all seem to show up just fine. It's a regular HBA and not a RAID card. Attached is a screenshot of my DMESG output.

 

[ProtoSD]

I *think* the drivers should work just fine with FreeNAS. There haven't been any mods to the kernel to prevent them from working that i'm aware of. I *think* with the SAS cards you need to flash them to IT mode before you can see the drives. There are lot of people here using SAS cards (I'm not one of them), so hopefully you should get a better answer on the IT mode part, but the driver should be fine.

 

[schfiftyfive]

Thanks for the quick reply. :)

The card is not a RAID card. Just a pure non-RAID HBA that passes the drives straight to the OS. So I don't think I need to flash it to IT mode or anything. I don't think it can even do that. I've tried the thing in Windows with the current hardware config and all the drives show individually. So I'm hoping that there's just something that I need to do to make the dev entries appear or something... I sent a support request to Areca to see what they have to say. They have been pretty good about getting back to me on other support requests fairly quickly, and even included the driver developer's e-mail addresses in the driver readme. So here's hoping they have an answer for me! I'll definitely post an update as to my resolution.

 

[EricSV]

I would be interested on what you find out. I am looking to build a 16 drive NAS box using an LSI SAS 9201-16i HBA. LSI has FreeBSD drivers but I wonder if I would run into the same issue.

 

[pcourtney]

LSI released on 17th February 2012 ver 13.00.01.00 drivers for FreeBSD 7.2.0, 7.4.0, 8.2.0

http://www.lsi.com/channel/products/storagecomponents/Pages/LSISAS9201-16i.aspx

these are great cards if you use a chassis like the Chenbro 9U RM91250H01 50 Bay Hotswap

http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=45

 

[orangepeelbeef]

Thanks for the quick reply. :)

The card is not a RAID card. Just a pure non-RAID HBA that passes the drives straight to the OS. So I don't think I need to flash it to IT mode or anything. I don't think it can even do that. I've tried the thing in Windows with the current hardware config and all the drives show individually. So I'm hoping that there's just something that I need to do to make the dev entries appear or something... I sent a support request to Areca to see what they have to say. They have been pretty good about getting back to me on other support requests fairly quickly, and even included the driver developer's e-mail addresses in the driver readme. So here's hoping they have an answer for me! I'll definitely post an update as to my resolution.

For what it's worth, I just installed the very same Areca 1320 card and with the areca arcsas driver added to freenas 8.2 all the drives showed up fine for me.

Areca may have updated the driver since then, and it seems to work now.

 

[lpitman]

What is the process for adding driver downloaded from Areca (arcsas.ko) to FreeNAS 8.3.1 ? I am a newbee and will need a step by step..

Thanks in advance.

 

[cyberjock]

You should add a ticket to support.freenas.org to add the driver. Then it'll be included in FreeNAS in the future for everyone.