[CentOS] Supermicro Adaptec AIC-9410 HostRAID controller

Wed Aug 26 15:50:19 UTC 2009
Kurt Newman <knewman at globaldataguard.com>

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1) Has anyone been able to get their AIC-9410 controller recognized in
CentOS 5.3?

I'm working with a Supermicro X7DBR-3 motherboard.  It has 2 "ICH Raid
Codebase" options in the Bios (Intel and Adaptec); neither of which seem
to change Linux's behavior.  The interesting part though, choosing
either Adaptec or Intel, then performing an 'lspci' always displays
"Intel Corp 631xESP/632xESP SATA RAID Controller (rev 09)".

I've seen several people post on a variety of mailing lists (typically
using older CentOS revisions), but it doesn't appear many were
successful.  It seems most swap to software raid.

2) When using this internal host raid controller, shouldn't the raided
devices appear as a single device like other traditional scsi controllers?

Regardless of the raid options I choose, Linux still continues to see
both drives (/dev/sda and /dev/sdb).  Is this a function of being
'HostRAID'?

3) If you've been able to get it to work, which driver did you use?

Thus far, I've tried 2 drivers.

1st driver: adpahci -- Unsuccessful

I downloaded it from supermicro's website.
ftp.supermicro.com/driver/SATA/Adaptec_ESB2/Linux/Redhat/adpahci.rhel5.i686.img

After successfully loading the image and inserting the module using
kickstart, nothing useful happens, other than several /sys entries
added.  (NOTE: I had to change the internal cpio archive pathing from
`2.6.18-8.el5' to `2.6.18-128.el5').

2nd driver: aic94xx -- Unsuccessful

The driver is built-in via a patch to the Redhat stock kernel.

Other than saying that it's loaded, it also does nothing useful outside
of /sys entries.  Several mailing lists and documents pointed to using
the 'attach_HostRAID' option, however, it doesn't exist.  Using this
option with `insmod' (or modprobe) fails.

3rd driver: adp94xx -- In the works

I downloaded this driver from Adaptec's website:
http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/speed/sas/linux/adp94xx-1_0_8-12_src_tgz.htm

So far, I'm not able to get it to compile because I'm trying to create a
patch file so that it incorporates all of the contents of the tarball.

Any ideas on where to go from here?  I'd really like to avoid software raid.

Thanks,
Kurt
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