This was bothering me, so I did a bit of looking.
According to slide 32 of this:
https://www.slideshare.net/solarisyougood/sparc-t4-1-system-technical-overview
'The SPARC T4-1 has Dual LSI SAS2008 8port SAS2/SATA2 controllers'
The LSI SAS2008 is apparently quite well supported by the mpii(4)
driver. As long as Oracle hasn't felt the need to be edgy, it should
work as intended.
I guess I've just answered my own question here re hardware raid as
mpii(4) states: 'All RAID configuration is done through the controllers'
BIOSes'
The BIOS only config requirement seems to preclude me from doing online
rebuilds of the drives in addition to this little tidbit:
'The chips supported by *mpii* do not use a SCSI-like identifier.
Instead they use an opaque ID and leave discovery order up to the
operating system. The code to handle this is currently not implemented
and therefore it is not a good idea to run this driver on a multi-boot
machine.'\
I digress.
On 12/28/17 11:45, Adam Thompson wrote:
I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that, sorry. Not sure if anyone
does... I think the SCSI HBA driver is the same on SPARC64 as on
AMD64, but then Sun had a habit of "improving" control interfaces for
Solaris so who knows. I do know under Solaris there is a bioctl-like
tool to manage it, for what that's worth.
-Adam
On December 28, 2017 1:32:40 PM CST, Jordan Geoghegan
<jgeoghega...@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes I had considered using the onboard hardware raid, but I don't
particularly trust it. I also need the ability to rebuild my arrays
while the machine is online and was hoping to be able to do the 3 disk
RAID1 offered by OpenBSD softraid. Do you know if bioctl(8) is capable
of controlling the onboard raid controller, or will I need to do all
raid rebuilds via the hardware raid bios on the T4?
On 12/28/17 08:58, Adam Thompson wrote:
On 2017-12-26 14:56, Jordan wrote:
I've recently gotten my hands on a couple shiny new SPARC
T4-1 and T3-1 servers and I was looking to install OpenBSD
with a softraid mirror on them for production use. The
problem is, is that I end up with this upon following the
install instructions and rebooting:
FWIW... AFAIK every single T4-1 (probably T3-1s but not
certain) is capable of hardware RAID-0/1/10 on the SCSI
controller, and that's how they're shipped from Sun/Oracle
even when running Solaris. I'm not absolutely certain that
it's supported by OpenBSD, but I do recall seeing that it
could be used as-is when I was investigating running OpenBSD
on my T-series gear. There's Oracle documentation on how to
access the on-card firmware to set up and manage the RAID set
in a pre-OS situation. YMMV. Unfortunately, both of mine are
still running Solaris so I can't confirm right now. -Adam
--
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