Skylake, xHCI and UPS: compatibility on FreeNAS 9.3?

[Nirshal]

Hello Everyone, I’m new to the forum and to FreeNas. I was running Nas4Free for one year on some old hardware (UFS only) and recently decided to invest some money in order to upgrade my system to a “new level of amazingness” :D

For this reason, I decided to go with the new Skylake architecture, knowing there still is poor support for some features (see xHCI), but with the idea that the initial investment (both money and troubleshooting time) could be rewarded in long therm with more knowledge and less obsolescence problems.

So here is my question: I have been looking on the forum about the issue with the xHCI, in order to understand if this only affects the ability to use USB key as boot devices or if anything connected through usb would not work. The reason why I’m searching this information is that I also want to buy a good UPS (no point in buying expensive hardware and use super-secure raid configuration if any electricity bump can jeopardize everything…am I right?;)) and I was asking myself if those that connect via USB would work with my server or not.

I know it is probably only a matter of waiting for FreeNAS 10 to be released, but just wanted to understand more on the topic.

I tried to manually load the xHCI driver to see if it was possible to mount an USB key, but was not successful (though did not really insisted on that, preferred to ask in order to avoid pointless efforts).

Can anyone explain in more details what is already working and what is not with xHCI on Skylake at the moment?

Any suggestion on the UPS? Is it dramatically more difficult to connect the UPS using the network interface?

Thanks a lot…

P.S: here is my config:

FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-(latest)
Intel Xeon E3-1230v5 (Skylake)
Supermicro X11SSH-F
Crucial 2x16GB DDR4-2133 ECC UDIMM
Sandisk ReadyCache SSD 32GB (FreeNas installation)
Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1Tb (Jails)
6xWD Red 4TB in RAIDZ2
Power Supply Corsair RM550 80Plus Gold
Cabine Fractal Define Node 804

 

[Mirfster]

There are a couple posts that may assist with this:
@Ericloewe 's "Supermicro X10/X11 motherboard FAQ" and "So, you've decided to buy a Supermicro X11 board..."

I have mentioned and I believe others have as well, that perhaps you could simply purchase a cheap USB 2.0 PCI card and use that as a workaround...

 

[Ericloewe]

Some important points:

• Skylake boards have NO USB support under FreeNAS 9.3 with default settings. xHCI may be stable with Skylake, but it wasn't with Haswell last anybody bothered to check.
• You can add any USB controller that supports EHCI. Be it a USB 2.0 controller or a USB 3.0 controller that exposes USB 2.0 as EHCI (if such a thing exists).
• Most UPSes will happily communicate over RS232. Lucky for you, you have RS-232 onboard!
• You can setup NUT on a second machine (possibly even a Raspberry Pi!) and connect the UPS to that machine (make sure it's also powered by the UPS, otherwise, NUT won't automatically shut down your server - but it will pester you with endless emails until power is restored and the NUT master is back online).
• Most consumer UPSes don't support direct network connectivity.

 

[Nirshal]

First of all, thanks a lot for the answers!!!
@Mirfster, I have been indeed reading those posts from @Ericloewe before buying my hardware, but unfortunately I was still not clear about the root of the problem (was just Grub? or FreeBSD?).
Now everything is clear!
I'll consider then the following two options:
a) going for the USB 2.0 adapter (need to google around to find a well supported one), then every good UPS will do the job;
or
b) buy an UPS able to interface with RS232 and USB, so that if I'll change my mobo in the future (with one without RS232) I'll still be able to use it via USB.

Option (a) seems more appealing for me at the moment (I know USB should not be used on a regular base on such a system, but I also think that being able to copy some data on an external USB disk can come handy sometime). By the way such an adapter could become useless when FreeNAS10 comes out, so I'll evaluate both alternatives.
I have seen there is more than one post discussing UPS in the forum, will take a look there.

Thanks again and have a nice evening!!!

 

[Nirshal]

Just saw that indeed there were updates on those posts I was unaware of, since I read them some time ago and (incorrectly) assumed that the discussion was closed. Should have checked again, sorry for that!

 

[Patrik L]

I had a similar issue last week when upgrading my home FreeNAS system to a Skylake H170 board. Moving the FreeNas system USB 3 stick to the new MB which only has USB 3.0 external ports the boot got stuck at the mountboot prompt regardless of BIOS settings. Tried to connect to the internal USB 2.0 header instead. No improvement. Put in a PCIe USB 3.0 card and moved the USB stick there. This did the trick and the system booted without problem. However, even after completed boot no USB devices can be connected to the on-board USB ports.

Looking at the postings at this forum and elsewhere the poor functionality of FreeNAS when it comes to USB 3.0 support is becoming an increasing problem as USB 2.0 is becoming a legacy specification and new MBs will not properly support it.

I believe a push from the development team to resolve the USB 3.0 issues would be gratefully appreciated by a lot of users and secure the ability to use USB for the system installation.

 

[rsquared]

The problem isn't quite 3.0 support it's that everything except XHCI was removed from Skylake.

The developers are neither ignorant of nor ignoring this. They are hard at work on FreeNAS 10, which will support this. Unfortunately for early adopters of Skylake, they decided to make this version a major rewrite long before such issues were known, and it's not expected to enter beta for a few months still.

At this point there's not much that can be done other than be patient. Nothing can be done for 9.3, and we certainly don't want them to rush out a half finished rewrite...

 

[Nirshal]

I assume the root cause was in the lack of a stable xHCI support from FreeBSD, not from FreeNAS developers... btw I was aware that using new hardware would have such implications, but in my opinion it is still worth to have some initial drawback and buy hardware that came out in 2015 than more consolidated one that was out years ago and was already on the way of obsolescence (personal opinion).
I'm eager for the FreeNAS 10 release for several reason, not only XHCI support, but also for the new web interface I read they are implementing, that should be a nice bump up with respect to the one we use today. Indeed this one is sometime a little tricky and need some practice before one can really become effective in using it (not my intention to criticize, just saying that there is margin for improvement).

 

[eye3]

I had a similar issue last week when upgrading my home FreeNAS system to a Skylake H170 board. Moving the FreeNas system USB 3 stick to the new MB which only has USB 3.0 external ports the boot got stuck at the mountboot prompt regardless of BIOS settings. Tried to connect to the internal USB 2.0 header instead. No improvement. Put in a PCIe USB 3.0 card and moved the USB stick there. This did the trick and the system booted without problem. However, even after completed boot no USB devices can be connected to the on-board USB ports.

Looking at the postings at this forum and elsewhere the poor functionality of FreeNAS when it comes to USB 3.0 support is becoming an increasing problem as USB 2.0 is becoming a legacy specification and new MBs will not properly support it.

I believe a push from the development team to resolve the USB 3.0 issues would be gratefully appreciated by a lot of users and secure the ability to use USB for the system installation.

Which PCIe USB 3.0 card did you use to get this to work? I'm also about to build a Skylake system.

 

[Patrik L]

This is the one I use:

http://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapt...press-SuperSpeed-USB-3-Card-Adapter~PEXUSB3S2

but as I bought it a few years ago it has been replaced by updated models.