Using IBM ServeRAID M1015 card in Linux
The FusionMPT SAS2 based cards by LSI are cheap RAID cards that perform well in RAID 0 and 1 under Linux with SSDs and ZFS arrays. They are used in many 1U servers with one or two disks. They are also a popular SAS 6.0 / SATA III controllers for enthusiasts. You can get them cheap on ebay. Before SATA III was common on motherboards, this was THE card to get. It can still be useful if you need SAS disks or additional disks or have a need for disk enclosures.
It is identical to the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9220-8i. The same hardware is also used in LSI 9240 and LSI 9211. It is possible to use the BIOS from another card (crossflashing) to change the features of the card. There are a few different BIOS files you can use.
Specifications:
Official LSI information
- 8-lane, 5 GT/s PCI Express 2.0
- Identical to LSI 9240-8i card
- 6 Gb/s per port
- Two x4 internal SFF-8087 connectors
- Controller LSISAS2008
- Low cost SATA+SAS RAID solution
- RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD mode
- >2TB logical drive support
- S.M.A.R.T. support
Crossflashing
The BIOS flashing procedure is well explained on the following page:
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-m1015-part-1-started-lsi-92208i/
I chose to flash the card to LSI9211-IR. This way I can use pass through for single drives and software RAID, and additionally use the RAID features of the card (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 1e and RAID 10).
To flash the card, read the excellent article above, but in short you have to boot with an USB stick with the correct firmware and and issue:
megarec -writesbr 0 sbrempty.bin
megarec -cleanflash 0
<reboot, back to USB stick>
sas2flsh -o -f 2118ir.bin -b mptsas2.rom
sas2flsh -o -sasadd 500605b0xxxxxxxx (x= numbers for SAS address)
<reboot>
The SAS address is found on the back of the card, on the green sticker.
In Linux
The card works out of the box in Linux. It is using the mpt2sas kernel driver.[root@localhost ~]# lspci|grep LSI
02:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] (rev 03)
Hard disks that use passthrough will be visible to smartmontools.
[root@localhost ~]# smartctl -a /dev/sdb
To show disks in RAID arrays you have to load the generic sg SCSI driver:
[root@localhost ~]# modprobe sg
Then you can add the disk to smartd:
echo "/dev/sg4 -d scsi -a -s L/../../3/02" >> /etc/smartmontools/smartd.conf
To keep the sg driver loaded over reboots, issue (on Fedora):
[root@localhost ~]# echo sq >> /etc/modules-load.d/sg.conf
Linux Tools
Because this is a low-end card, MegaCLI and similar tools will not work with the Fusion-MPT SAS-2. LSI provides a command line tool with basic funtionality, sas2ircu. The tool is hard to find, but at least supermicro provides a link for it. The tool is mostly useful for monitoring.Simple usage:
[root@localhost ~]# sas2ircu LIST
LSI Corporation SAS2 IR Configuration Utility.
Version 16.00.00.00 (2013.03.01)
Copyright (c) 2009-2013 LSI Corporation. All rights reserved.
Adapter Vendor Device SubSys SubSys
Index Type ID ID Pci Address Ven ID Dev ID
----- ------------ ------ ------ ----------------- ------ ------
0 SAS2008 1000h 72h 00h:02h:00h:00h 1000h 3020h
SAS2IRCU: Utility Completed Successfully.
[root@localhost ~]# sas2ircu 0 DISPLAY
...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ IR Volume information ------------------------------------------------------------------------ IR volume 1 Volume ID : 286 Status of volume : Okay (OKY) Volume wwid : 0c620c8063bd337c RAID level : RAID1 Size (in MB) : 428199 Boot : Primary Physical hard disks : PHY[0] Enclosure#/Slot# : 1:0 PHY[1] Enclosure#/Slot# : 1:1 ...
There is a nice script, sas2ircu-status, at HWRAID. The script can be used with nagios to report the status of the controller and RAID arrays.
I made a cron script to regularly check the status of the controller and send a mail if there is something wrong. It is used together with the sas2ircu-status script. You can download it here.
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