Thunderbolt 3 expansion support?

[Plato]

Hi,

A few days ago my C2750D4I finally gave its life away.

I'm planning to buy X11SSH-CTF-O instead with E3-1230V6.. Until it arrives though I still want to access to my server..

I have a ZBOX MI572 as spare which I have used when my CPU failed on my PC.. I used it until my replacement CPU arrived with a TB3 eGPU case.. It has i7-7700T CPU, 1 TB M.2 HDD, 2 TB SSHD and 16 GB RAM...

What I plan to do is may be a bit reckless.. I want to put my LSI2008 SAS card into TB3 box and connect it to ZBOX, after that I'll connect my storage array connected to Intel Expander to LSI card..

I'll boot it with a clone of my USB sticks ( I am not sure how a hardware change would affect the configurations ) and use it like that until my new server hardware arrives.

The only concern I have is I was using 32GB ECC RAM on ASRock, with this I'll use 16GB non-ECC RAM. I also don't really know if TB3 port will work with LSI card without problem or not ( does FreeNAS 11 have TB3 support?!? )

What do you think? Is it feasible?

 

[Chris Moore]

Thunder Bolt... FreeNAS doesn't even have good support for eSATA port multiplyer. I think you're not going anywhere with this idea.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[danb35]

FreeNAS doesn't even have good support for eSATA port multiplyer.

That's because the concept is inherently crap--it isn't that FreeBSD's support is bad, it's that the hardware just sucks. But that's neither here nor there with respect to Thunderbolt (in any flavor).

 

[Chris Moore]

That's because the concept is inherently crap--it isn't that FreeBSD's support is bad, it's that the hardware just sucks. But that's neither here nor there with respect to Thunderbolt (in any flavor).

Does that mean Thunderbolt is fully functional and the OPs idea is going to work?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[danb35]

I can't speak to that one way or the other, but it doesn't sound like you can either. You point out that SATA multipliers don't work well--true enough, but completely unrelated to OP's question. Complete non sequitur.

 

[Chris Moore]

I can't speak to that one way or the other, but it doesn't sound like you can either. You point out that SATA multipliers don't work well--true enough, but completely unrelated to OP's question. Complete non sequitur.

You might feel that it is a non sequitur, but I think they are related. SATA Port Multiplier hardware works reliably on Linux. It originally worked well enough on BSD (when I started using FreeNAS) but support on BSD actually got worse instead of better.
Hardware drivers are the problem. I had a SATA Port Multiplier 4 drive enclosure connected and working as an external backup pool and it worked really well for a couple years. Then an update (FreeBSD 10 if I recall) caused it to not work any more. Same hardware that was working stopped because of an improvement. Even after that I was able to trick it into working if I disconnected the enclosure for boot and hot-plugged it after the system was up. I just had to manually import the pool. Now, with version 11 it is completely dead. Upgrades should make things better, not break them and it isn't as if the technology has gone away, the ability to do that is part of the SATA spec which is why it works in Windows and Linux.
Driver support is the only excuse for it not working in BSD. Not that it is much of an excuse.

 

[Stux]

Thunderbolt is just PCIe over a cable. The idea is fine... *if* FreeBSD has decent thunderbolt support, which it probably doesn’t.

 

[Plato]

It seems what Stux says is true. Here is the lspci output:

Code:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Device 591f (rev 05)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 630 (rev 04)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H USB 3.0 xHCI Controller (rev 31)
00:14.2 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H Thermal subsystem (rev 31)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H CSME HECI #1 (rev 31)
00:17.0 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation SATA Controller [RAID mode] (rev 31)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #5 (rev f1)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #7 (rev f1)
00:1c.7 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #8 (rev f1)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #9 (rev f1)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H LPC Controller (rev 31)
00:1f.2 Memory controller: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H PMC (rev 31)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H HD Audio (rev 31)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-H SMBus (rev 31)
01:00.0 USB controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1142 USB 3.1 Host Controller
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 3165 (rev 81)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 07)
04:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation DSL6340 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Alpine Ridge 2C 2015]
05:00.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation DSL6340 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Alpine Ridge 2C 2015]
05:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation DSL6340 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Alpine Ridge 2C 2015]
05:02.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation DSL6340 Thunderbolt 3 Bridge [Alpine Ridge 2C 2015]
06:00.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation DSL6340 Thunderbolt 3 NHI [Alpine Ridge 2C 2015]

As you can see it detects TB3 bridge devices, but...

mpsutil show all

Code:

Adapter:
mpsutil: mps_open: No such file or directory
Devices:
mpsutil: mps_open: No such file or directory
Enclosures:
mpsutil: mps_open: No such file or directory
Expanders:
mpsutil: mps_open: No such file or directory

sas2flash

Code:

LSI Corporation SAS2 Flash Utility
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2008-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved

		No LSI SAS adapters found! Limited Command Set Available!
		Finished Processing Commands Successfully.
		Exiting SAS2Flash.

So, even if Freenas detects TB3 ports, it doesn't detect what's connected to that port. It's no use.