Truenas Scale LSI HBA Adapter P20 Firmware required.

[jdyoung]

What I am trying to determine is if P20 firmware is required for HBA adapter inside Truenas Scale. I have an HP DL380e Gen8 that, I got for Christmas, with 14 total bays, perfect for storage!!! HP is ....well... particular about the devices you attach.
I have another LSI with firmware P20 in it (a 9205-8i if I recall) and when I used it in place of the HP P420i that came with the server, the fans run at a constant 58% , which is quite audible. So I purchased an HP H220 off eBay (which turns out be the 2308 version 9207-8i). It was already flashed for IT Mode, and when I used it, the fans dropped to the low 30%, which is nice. The problem (maybe) was that that card had version P15 in it (which is the most recent version from HP directly). Reading thru posts and forums, the consensus was Trueneas required P20. But that was for Freenas/TrueNAS Core. I finally found an older version of sas2flash utility to update the firmware, but after updating it to P20, the fans are back to near 60% because the card isn't recognized as an HP flavor anymore!

So my question is , for Truenas Scale, will version P20 be required (thus having to deal with the louder fans) or will it not care as much and P15 be just fine? I tried looking thru the Truenas Scale forum, but my search didn't result in anything.

Thanks for any help!

 

[morganL]

Its really a Debian Linux support question... my guess is Debian will support both, but testing would be required.

 

[jdyoung]

My first thought was the same rule that applied to BSD, did not necessarily mean it had to be the same for Scale. I will look to some Debian specific forums for answers, just thought I would start here, since Truenas Scale is what I want to run.
Thanks for the very quick response @morganL , much appreciated!

 

[jgreco]

For FreeBSD, we know the LSI HBA's and the specific firmware requirements are needed because of the misadventures people have had doing other things.

While the exact specifics are going to be different for Debian, it may be worth going over my post

https://www.truenas.com/community/t...s-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.81931/

with an open mind, knowing that the specifics will be different for Debian, but issues such as "crushing amounts of I/O" and "driver needs to be as close to 100.000% as possible" are very real things that will be important on Debian too.

Just as with FreeBSD, many Linux drivers are reverse-engineered and may have been written by enthusiasts who did not have the incentive, documentation, and/or means to extensively test failure modes, handle exceptions, etc. The flip side is that there are more Linux people banging away on many more Linux systems out there, so I suspect there's a wider array of hardware that will be problem-free, but there is also a much broader range of "supported" hardware in Linux ("supported" meaning not 100%), so it will be interesting to see how that works out.

It is probably worth paying attention to hardware other ZOL users have been having fantastic success with.

 

[nasbdh9]

The fan problem mainly comes from HPE's "stupid" iLO, iLO does not support any manual adjustment of fan speed, which is completely controlled by the system itself, unless you obtain ssh root privileges through loopholes to adjust

 

[jdyoung]

For FreeBSD, we know the LSI HBA's and the specific firmware requirements are needed because of the misadventures people have had doing other things.

While the exact specifics are going to be different for Debian, it may be worth going over my post

https://www.truenas.com/community/t...s-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.81931/

with an open mind, knowing that the specifics will be different for Debian, but issues such as "crushing amounts of I/O" and "driver needs to be as close to 100.000% as possible" are very real things that will be important on Debian too.

Just as with FreeBSD, many Linux drivers are reverse-engineered and may have been written by enthusiasts who did not have the incentive, documentation, and/or means to extensively test failure modes, handle exceptions, etc. The flip side is that there are more Linux people banging away on many more Linux systems out there, so I suspect there's a wider array of hardware that will be problem-free, but there is also a much broader range of "supported" hardware in Linux ("supported" meaning not 100%), so it will be interesting to see how that works out.

It is probably worth paying attention to hardware other ZOL users have been having fantastic success with.

Thanks for all of that info! I will definitely read thru that post! I know the older firmware may not be fully compatible Debian, which I am looking into now, but at least the fans are at a reasonable level due to HP's quirkiness , which I know is not a substitute for data integrity! If I have to choose between fan speed/sound and drivers that produce better data integrity, I will take data integrity.

 

[jdyoung]

The fan problem mainly comes from HPE's "stupid" iLO, iLO does not support any manual adjustment of fan speed, which is completely controlled by the system itself, unless you obtain ssh root privileges through loopholes to adjust

Yeah, I didn't realize that until I got the system and started playing with the system. Definitely a benefit of the Dell systems, as they are not that picky! Maybe there is a solution to get around iLO, but for now, it is what it is...

 

[inman.turbo]

Yeah, I didn't realize that until I got the system and started playing with the system. Definitely a benefit of the Dell systems, as they are not that picky! Maybe there is a solution to get around iLO, but for now, it is what it is...

Yep iDrac is nice in the later generations, in that it gives you much more control over your hardware than ilo.