SAS device not recognized

[jakeblues]

Hello There,

I would need some help to passthrough a SAS PCIe Card to a Windows 10 VM. It is a SAS3442E-R.
Only an external LTO-5 Tapedrive is attached. I don't need the Raid functionality.
I looked it up and it should be compatible with FreeBSD. The "PCI Passthrough Device" tab at the VM is empty though.
Physical green lights are on at the card and I know it isn't broken as I pulled it out from another PC.

Could you give me two hints:
1. Where/How can I see if the card is being recognized by FreeBSD/TrueNAS
2. Where/How can I see if the card is being recognized by the BIOS (found no device listings, only genreal settings at PCIe Tab in BIOS and IPMI only shows CPU and RAM)

Thanks a lot!

 

[Ericloewe]

SAS1? Don't see many of those these days.

Where/How can I see if the card is being recognized by FreeBSD/TrueNAS

See if it shows up in lspci

 

[jakeblues]

Wow! This was fast! Yes, there it is:

02:00.0 SCSI storage controller: Broadcom / LSI SAS1068E PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS (rev 08)

What could be the problem that I cannot passthrough?

 

[Ericloewe]

Hard to say in the abstract. Is the system firmware configured to support passthrough (VT-d enabled, etc.)?

 

[jakeblues]

Figured it out! As I am still in a testing phase I switched from Core to Scale. In Scale it showed up and was immediately recognized by Windows. Guess I'll stick with Scale.

Thank you so much for your support!!!

 

[jakeblues]

I would have one last question: As described above, I'm planning to virtualize my PC where I was running backups to tape and external drives.
Is it a save way to go with Scale and Win10 VM or do you think I will loose Data because of accessing the LTO and external USB-HDDs via virtualized hardware-connections? The network-source-shares would be mounted via SMB in the VM as ZFS can't be accessed natively by WIN10. Or is there a better way to go?

 

[Ericloewe]

There's no major issue with the concept, but why do you need Windows in the mix?

 

[jakeblues]

I saw that coming . I know that there is tar but I'm in an environment where I have to use LTFS for a fast and easy way to copy files. I know that with FreeBSD there is a GitHub Version available but I don't know how stable this is. And now that I switched to Scale I don't know if there is a Linux version for LTFS. A GUI would also be nice as I am not the only one who has to transfer the files. If there is an alternative to Windows or a simpler solution I would like to step that road.

 

[Ericloewe]

LTFS... I only have experience with LTO3, so I never messed around with LTFS (spinning rust is slow enough for me), but I imagine it's still pretty slow, no?

 

[jakeblues]

LTFS was first introduced with LTO-5. As I'm transferring only big files write speeds (uncompressed) reach up to 60-100 MBps wich is okay. From the specs they should go as high as 280 compressed and 140 uncompressed. But I never reached those. I had a problem with shoe shining in WIN10 wich I hadn't in WIN7. Then the transfer rates went crazy slow. I guess I have to face this problem again and find a solution as I couldn't get WIN7 to work in TrueNAS Core VM (no mouse and no USB driver could be loaded from virtIO after Installation)

 

[jakeblues]

So far I could't get things done with Scale. To many bugs with the VMs. So I guess I'm back with Core. I have one trace why the SAS isn't being recognized. I searched the forum and found a hint that VT-D has to be enabled wich was already enabled and the second thing is that iommu has to be set in the kernel.

dmesg | grep -e DMAR -e IOMMU

Output shows nothing. So this is a sign that iommu is off.

The post says "intel_iommu=on"has to be enabled on the kernel command line. But I have no clou where I have to put that line in BSD.

These are the posts I'm referring to:

SOLVED - How to pass through a pcie device such as a network card to VM

How to pass through a pcie device such as a network card to VM In SCALE

www.truenas.com

How do I enable IOMMU on a Supermicro X10DRi-T4+ motherboard?

I have a Supermicro X10DRi-T4+ motherboard with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 processors. It has the latest BIOS already. Intel VT-x AND Intel VT-d are enabled in the BIOS, but when I probe the system in Proxmox, it doesn’t show that it is actually enabled and/or operational. Any help...

forum.level1techs.com

This would be another post where someone encounters a similar problem:

VT-d supported, but no IOMMU?

I have an intel DZ77GA-70K board with an intel core i7-3770 processor. Everything I can find online says this setup supports VT-d, for example the intel ark page on that processor...

forums.freebsd.org

But I guess my knowledge isn't that deep for that kind of coding. I hope there is an easier fix for my problem.

Any help would be much appreciated how to get that card working.