The LSI 9211-8i 6Gb/s SATA +SAS HBA, which I recently obtained, is running the stock IR (Integrated RAID) firmware. In order to use the disks in strictly passthrough mode and avoid having any metadata written to them by the card, the card needs to be changed over to IT (Initiator Target) firmware. I had heard about this before. And I’ve read it about it on the From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS Controllers for ZFS & Linux MD RAID post. More recently, I found the Flashing IT Firmware to the LSI SAS9211-8i HBA post.
This process seems a bit daunting. But we’ll see. I’ve flashed firmware before, but it mostly consisted of burning a CD and booting from it. This particular process seems to have many more moving parts.
The card in question (as taken from /var/run/dmesg.boot) is:
mps0: <LSI SAS2008> port 0x8000-0x80ff mem 0xfde3c000-0xfde3ffff,0xfde40000-0xfde7ffff irq 28 at device 0.0 on pci1 mps0: Firmware: 14.00.01.00, Driver: 14.00.00.01-fbsd mps0: IOCCapabilities: 185c<ScsiTaskFull,DiagTrace,SnapBuf,EEDP,TransRetry,IR>
pciconf -lv includes this:
mps0@pci0:1:0:0: class=0x010700 card=0x30201000 chip=0x00721000 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
device = 'SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]'
class = mass storage
subclass = SAS
I also found this post talking about number devices and remembering them.
I started a discussion on this topic in the FreeBSD Forums.
I finally got it installed. Details on Google+.
This is also an interesting read and contains a tip about configuring Boot Support on your board post-upgrade.
After upgrading, this is how the card looks:
mps0: <LSI SAS2008> port 0x8000-0x80ff mem 0xfde3c000-0xfde3ffff,0xfde40000-0xfde7ffff irq 28 at device 0.0 on pci1
mps0: Firmware: 15.00.00.00, Driver: 14.00.00.01-fbsd
mps0: IOCCapabilities: 1285c<ScsiTaskFull,DiagTrace,SnapBuf,EEDP,TransRetry,EventReplay,HostDisc>
mps0@pci0:1:0:0: class=0x010700 card=0x30201000 chip=0x00721000 rev=0x03 hdr=0x00
vendor = 'LSI Logic / Symbios Logic'
device = 'SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]'
class = mass storage
subclass = SAS
See also IBM ServeRAID M1015 Part 4: Cross flashing to a LSI9211-8i in IT or IR mode and LSI Controller FW updates IR/IT modes.
