SAS2008 (LSI) controller support

1st Official Post

    Hi

    I've freshly installed OMV on Pegatron motherboard with Celeron 847 (quite old and exotic but works). It's mini ITX form factor, but contains PCIex slot. I've put there LSI SAS controller, which is flashed to IT mode.


    I boot from SSD drive attached directly to motherboard SATA port. Everything works like expected: all partitions on disk are visible, SMART fully works.


    I've attached also SAS disk, HGST 7200 RPM, via LSI controller. OMV sees this disk but:

    - SMART status, when enabled, is not green, just grey

    - SMART information sees only serial number in first three tabs, everything else is empty

    - Extended information is there, I'll attach it


    But it's not the end of story.

    I've created partition on this disk. It was created successfully, it's visible in command line via fdisk, but OMV doesn't see it (despite it've created it):

    Questions:

    1. is LSI SAS controller fully supported by OMV?

    2. Why OMV doesn't see partition it has just created?

    3. Why SMART is not fully visible in tabs?

    4. Is this disk simply a trash?


    Attached SMART extended information:

    1. Mine is, LSI 9200-8e.

    2. It can be problematic for OMV to see partitions and filesystems that are created in the command line shell. Try in OMV's GUI.

    3.Not sure.

    4.Not sure.

    --
    Google is your friend and Bob's your uncle!


    OMV AMD64 6.x on headless Chenbro NR12000 1U 1x 8m Quad Core E3-1220 3.1GHz 32GB ECC RAM.

    • Official Post

    The SMART info is retrieved via smartctl -x /dev/sdX. Does it show the correct data? Retrieving SMART through an HBA is tricky because smartctl sometimes need to add the -d XXX attribute, see https://github.com/openmediava…smartinformation.inc#L156. To find this out programatically it requires the information that the disk is attached to an HBA. OMV tries to detect this itself, so if the HBA is not detected, then retrieving SMART may not work. Maybe it is necessary to implement support for your controller, but i'm not sure.


    Please run the following command:

    Code
    # cat /proc/partitions
# blkid


    It may be helpful to find out whether your HBA can be detected by OMV. Please run this code interactively in the CLI (replace /dev/sdX with your devicefile).


    Code
    root@media:~# python3
Python 3.7.3 (default, Dec 20 2019, 18:57:59) 
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import openmediavault.device
>>> sd = openmediavault.device.StorageDevice("/dev/sdX")
>>> sd.host_driver
'hpsa'

    I'm attaching output of all commands.


    Code
    root@silver:~# # cat /proc/partitions
root@silver:~# blkid
/dev/sdb1: UUID="1dafbbd2-a13e-4234-92c9-059cb88b0043" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="87686664-01"
/dev/sdb5: UUID="29050859-081b-4f04-8f9b-d687028c794e" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="87686664-05"


    Code
    root@silver:~# python3
Python 3.7.3 (default, Dec 20 2019, 18:57:59)
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import openmediavault.device
>>> sd = openmediavault.device.StorageDevice("/dev/sda")
>>> sd.host_driver
'mpt2sas'


    oh, I didn't notice this hash :D


    Code
    root@silver:~# cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name


8       16  117220824 sdb
8       17  113110016 sdb1
8       18          1 sdb2
8       21    4108288 sdb5
8        0 2930266584 sda
8        1 2930265543 sda1


    I've recreated partition on sda again, and during creation I see this partition on the list (in the background, under popup window). Creating filesystem takes some time, and when it ends and I close a popup window, partition disappears from list.

    I don't understand. This disk was previously ZFS disk. I've just put it into OMV. It didn't see any filesystem on this disk, so I just pressed "create" button, it offered me this disk, then I accepted. It created filesystem on it, it took some times. During this process I saw filesystem, but when the window is closed - it disappeared.

    Maybe there's unsupported partition type or what? I'll try to remove whole partition from this disk to make it totally empty - let's see if it helps.

    • Official Post
    Quote from Marx

    During this process I saw filesystem, but when the window is closed - it disappeared.

    I remember some users had this issue in the past. As far as i remember the problem was that the disk contained old metadata that confuses blkid (the command used to get the filesystem information). In such cases the users reported that wiping the disk in secure mode helped to fix the issue.

    Maybe you're right

    I've recreated partition but it still shows :

    /dev/sda: TYPE="zfs_member" PTUUID="c3264049-2b83-4d76-b04b-07948b43aac7" PTTYPE="gpt"
    what does this TYPE mean and how to set it correctly? Using parted I've just create primary partition from command line, no filesystem yet:

    Code
    (parted) mkpart primary
File system type?  [ext2]? ext4
Start? 0
End? 3001GB
Warning: The resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance.
Ignore/Cancel? I
(parted) quit
Information: You may need to update /etc/fstab.

    Should I do that in different way?

    I've recreated GPT partition table, partition type changed from zfs_member to atari(?). Then I've created filesystem using mkfs.ext4 - it complained about "atari" stuff but finally created filesystem and now it's visible in OMV.


    Unfortunately SMART is still not parsed.

    maybe it helps others searching for LSI controller information

    here seems to be a good place to learn

    omv 6.1.4-2 (Shaitan) on RPi CM4/4GB with 64bit Kernel 5.15.84-v8+

    2x 6TB 3.5'' HDDs (CMR) formatted with ext4 via 2port PCIe SATA card with ASM1061R chipset providing hardware supported RAID1


    omv 5.6.21-1 (usul) on RPi4/4GB with 32bit Kernel 5.10.63 and WittyPi 3 V2 RTC HAT

    2x 3TB 3.5'' HDDs (CMR) formatted with ext4 in Icy Box IB-RD3662-C31 / hardware supported RAID1

    For Read/Write performance of SMB shares hosted on this hardware see forum here

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