[CentOS] CentOS 5.5 does not recognise SAS drives with LSI 1068E Controller

Brandon Ooi brandono at gmail.com
Wed Mar 16 21:10:37 UTC 2011


Hi Peter,

I too was very undecided about using the LSI 1068e (on-board many supermicro
boards) in production for this very reason. The problem is that chipset is
basically unsupported by LSI and updates to it are sometimes necessary to
maintain compatibility. The driver won't build sometimes on updated kernels
forcing you to hold onto a particular version.  Even if you could get away
from that, the driver is black box and we found it to be somewhat unreliable
(read: crashy). I believe even in IT mode that chipset requires a different
driver (not megasr, mptsas?) and was also black box.

We decided after a few update mistakes and trips to the datacenter, it
wasn't worth it. I suggest instead buying a separate megaraid card (highly
recommend the 92XX series) which are very well supported by the open source,
in-kernel driver (megaraid_sas? megasas?). I don't believe the 1068e is a
wise choice for new installations and the 4i variants run as low as $180
new.

We currently run, in production, the X8DT3 with a 9240-8i card and skipped
the onboard.

Brandon

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Peter Peltonen <peter.peltonen at gmail.com>wrote:

> I have now partially solved my problem:
>
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Peter Peltonen <peter.peltonen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I need to do a new CentOS net install on a new server having the
> > Supermicro X7DVL-3 motherboard:
>
> [...]
>
> > So I assume the controller is not supported and I need a binary driver
> > for it. For 1068e it should be:
>
> I received the driver image megasr-13.17.0421.2010-1-rhel50-u5-all.img
> from the hardware vendor and was able to use it as the driver disk for
> installation.
>
> Upgrading the kernel issue is still unresolved though:
>
> > And what happens if I get the driver installed and then the server's
> > kernel is updated? Do I need reinstall the driver somehow?
>
> After updates the system is unable to boot with the new kernel as it
> cannot find the megasr driver.
>
> What shoudl I do? Does the megasr module for the old kernel also work
> with the new kernel => do I need to copy it somewhere and create an
> initrd  image including that module? Or do I need to find an updated
> megasr module from somewhere?
>
> Best regards,
> Peter
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