OSX HBA IT mode cards

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dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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looking for how a 2008 based card like a 9212-4e4i or similar in IT mode can run in a mac OS X 10.11

looking for ZFS support and cant get the card to be recognized in OS X on a hackintosh.. can see the card fine in bios..

dont need boot

dont want raid .. just IT mode since ZFS needs the whole disk.

thanks in advance
 

dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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thanks.. found that thread and yes.. unfortunately it does not work for IT based fusion MPT cards

I am trying to figure out if any of the 3 native OS X kexts could work for this 2008 based card but the applelsifusionmpt.kext seems like it is only 1068 based cards... so I dont think that will work either

I did find a kext/application package by Astek that is available for download although not supported since about 2008. Its for lsi based cards and native cards by Astek work supposedly without a activation key.

since its no longer supported you cant buy a key, and I dont see any flash files there to try and cross flash to Astek firmware.

the drivers DO work, I installed just the 2 kexts from the package and I can see language about a license key.

the documents say it will work without license "with restrictions" but I does not say what that is.. I assume it limits the number of dev but its not specified.

hopefully a coder here can crack open the kext and look at the plist files and figure out if activation can be bypassed as this looks like it could be a good OS X driver for these cards.
 

dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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loaded the kexts from the Astek driver package.. leaving out the management and registration software since I am not running a raid, just an lsi9212 HBA IT..

it works... so far

the Astek site claims that without a license (which they no longer sell) and using it on a non Astek card, it will be 'limited' but it does not say what the limitations are

a licensed copy can control up to 128 drives so perhaps it reduces that.

I have not tried to connect the card to an expander chassis so perhaps it won't permit that.

In the kexts I found some information in the plist file that mentions an activation process but not being a coder I cant tell if there is an easy way to circumvent the activation

I called astek and while they have it up for anyone to use free, they on longer provide ANY support, the coders that designed it moved on and they claim the no longer have the repositories or anything.. so it is AS-IS.

perhaps someone smarter than me here can figure it out!

A3DRV-HBA Legacy - Obsoleted, No Support - Astek Corporation

Apple Hardware
  • Intel based MacPro (all models) with at least one PCI-Express slot available
  • Intel based MacBook, iMac, MacMini systems with Thunderbolt external enclosures†
Processors/Kernels
  • Intel x86 (32-bit) and Intel x86_64 (64-bit)
LSISAS Cards
  • LSI SAS 9200-8e, 8 ports external, PCIe 2.0
  • LSI SAS 9201-16e, 16 ports external, PCIe 2.0
  • LSI SAS 9202-16e, 16 ports external, PCIe 2.0
  • LSI SAS 9205-8e, 8 ports external, PCIe 2.0 (best for SSDs)
  • LSI SAS 9207-8e. 8 ports external PCIe 3.0
  • LSI SAS 9207-4i4e, 4 ports external, 4 ports internal, PCIe 3.0
LSISAS Controllers
  • LSISAS2008
  • LSISAS2116
  • LSISAS2308
Firmware Features
  • Integrated RAID0/1/10◊
 

adgenet

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Apr 12, 2016
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Nice work on finding this driver.
The "demo" mode restricts the number of target disks, according to the driver readme file, though it doesn't mention a number.
 

dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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now we just need to have a look at the driver and see how the licensing function works and see if there is a workaround..
 

kurbads

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Oct 17, 2017
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the drivers DO work, I installed just the 2 kexts from the package
Hi, would you mind sharing the kexts? Or at least their names so there is something to google for. The link you provided is dead. The compatibility list does not say anything about LSI 9212 but you claim it works. How come? Did you edit the plist?
Also, could you share something what is mystery to me, how can you tell that the card is MPT fusion?
When you crossflash the cards, it says something about the card being in fusion mode. Is that it? What does it mean?
And it has MPT Bios. Is that what is meant by MPT fusion?
Edit: OK, got it, I run DSPCI in terminal and it says,
LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon] [1000:0072]
I suppose that explains that.
I have two cards
LSI 9211-4i 0x00701000 and
LSI 9211-8i 0x00721000
none of them appear to work with the SASMegaRAID kext even when flashed to IR mode and virtual disk created and formatted.
One says it is SAS2004 during boot, other says it is SAS2008
Also they talk about chip number. I have a sticker on chip saying 1284, is that it?
David
 
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dragonme

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dave contacted me. and I dont have them anymore.. I gave up and went esxi and virtualized the osx environement..

I think I posted on a mac site like tonymac or insanelymac etc and a guy managed to hack them to work without the drive restriction but I didnt follow the thread since I went in a different direction so I really cant help at this point it was over a year ago...
 

kurbads

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Oct 17, 2017
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Found it: [Guide] Z820 - El Capitan The great guide (Sucess) - Installation Guides

I don't have the card at hand but it looks promising. It has this section in it

<key>IOPCIPrimaryMatch</key>
<string>0x00641000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x00651000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x00701000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x00721000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x007E1000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x00861000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x00871000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF 0x006E1000&amp;0xFFFFFFFF</string>

It lists both of my cards.

The kexts are called AstekFusion2Adapter.kext and AstekFusion2Family.kext

These are patched versions.
 

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dragonme

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glad I was able to help out so you could track it down...

He had contacted me a couple months ago saying that it was a great idea to poke around the binary to deactivate the card check and restrictions and he thought he had it working good and wanted me to check it out but I told him I had moved on to an esxi solution and could not test it.


let me know how it works out and if its stable. if esxi continues to be flakey I might change my mind and go back hackintosh on this server but I dont think I could get the power management working as good as esxi either so it would chew more watts in idle.
 

sullivan

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Mar 27, 2016
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looking for how a 2008 based card like a 9212-4e4i or similar in IT mode can run in a mac OS X 10.11

looking for ZFS support and cant get the card to be recognized in OS X on a hackintosh.. can see the card fine in bios..
I know they are not as cheap or widely available as LSI cards, but the ATTO ExpressSAS cards work great under OSX and fully support SAS-2 features: SAS expanders (multiple levels) and disks > 2TB.

The two cards to look for are the ATTO H608 (internal 8-port) and ATTO H680 (external 8-port). These are pure HBA cards (no RAID) and they work well with ZFS, i.e. OpenZFS on OSX (openzfsonosx.org)

You can get these for $200 used, $350 new. Current versions of OSX (Sierra, High Sierra) have a built-in ATTO driver that works OK, and ATTO provides updated drivers on their website.

I use a lot of LSI SAS gear (HBAs, expanders, switches) with Linux. I actually purchased the Astek OSX driver years ago, but it was overall pretty disappointing. One issue I recall is that it did not work with OSX power management, i.e. it would drop drives during sleep/wake.

The ATTO cards work well with my other LSI-based storage, and the driver support is seamless including sleep/wake.
 
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kurbads

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Oct 17, 2017
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There is a bunch of LSI 9211-8i selling for £29+ on eBay. And I can confirm that you can cross flash them to IT, RAID mode or to H310 Perc without any problems forwards and backwards. And that they support over 2TB disks. This card I got supports a 8TB HGST drive, Highpoint Rocket RAID 2710 card refused to work for (under Mac only, reporting it as 1TB disabled). What a waste of money.

Screen Shot 2017-11-26 at 09.30.16.png
Screen Shot 2017-11-26 at 09.29.42.png
This is DSPCI printout
07:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller [0107]: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic SAS2004 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Spitfire] [1000:0070] (rev 03) (subsys 1000:3010)
 
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TheBloke

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To add to the info in this thread for those who find it later, as I did:
  1. The Astek drivers have been updated for support of Sierra and High Sierra, and can be found in this InsanelyMac post.
  2. To install them, mount your EFI partition (eg with Clover Configurator), then unzip the two kext files into EFI/CLOVER/kexts/Other
  3. These drivers are working fine for both my 9201-8i and 9205-8e cards in IT mode. They should also work fine with the 9207-8e, and likely most or all other 2008 and 2308 cards.
  4. By default, any drives connected to your LSI controllers will be marked by macOS as 'external'; to fix this, install this KextPatch (InsanelyMac post).
 

TheBloke

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However, the drivers do not work for sleep/wake - as I now see that @sullivan found years ago, too. At least it doesn't when you're booted from a drive on the LSI.

Specifically, the system will sleep OK, but on wake it will show the desktop with a working mouse pointer, but is otherwise completely frozen - you can't click on anything or interact in any way. I guess this is because the system drive has become inaccessible after sleep.
 

dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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@TheBloke

good info.. i would never have thought to use the lsi as a boot volume but good info..

1 > are you using the card as a megaraid raid set or did you flash the card to IT mode

2> to be clear.. these drivers werent 'updated' to work for osx.. they were hacked. this driver was propriatary to the astek cards and at my suggestion, found someone that took a peek at them with a hex editor to edit out the mfg check.

3> if being used as a raid.. it probably comes back up as being faulted.. this use to happen to an old rocketraid card that I had.. it was hw raid and it did not like to sleep.. wake would result in an alarm and faulted set.

if the card is flashed to IT mode and its a singe drive. .perhaps a peek into the kext to see if its enabled for power management... good possibility it could be fixed.. or the timeout lengthened ..

have you tried booting off a traditional sata port and using a data drive on the card and sleeping? IE will it sleep if its not a boot drive?
 
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TheBloke

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Hi @dragonme , thanks very much for the post

1. Card is in IT mode, no RAID. Though I am considering maybe making a 2 x SSD RAID-0 in future. But currently not.

2. That's true :) Though the 'update' I was talking about was not the initial hack you talk about (removing mfg check), but rather a much simpler change that enabled it to work on Sierra and High Sierra. The version produced back in 2016 would kernel panic in 10.12 and 10.13, and a user on InsanelyMac forum called despeinao produced the fix that enabled them to work again. But yes, all of this is a hack and completely unauthorised from Astek's perspective :)

3. Not RAID so not this

4. Yes I have booted off internal SATA with a data drive on the LSI, and this does work. I did have a small glitch with it, whereby when I slept/woke and then later shut down, my PC automatically started up again. An issue I've had many times before, related to ACPI on the Hackintosh, but gone since I got the right ACPI settings.

But it doesn't always happen with the LSI in place, and anyway this is a much less important issue. So for the purposes of this discussion, yes sleep/wake with an LSI data drive does work and so the Astek drivers are enabled for power management in principle.

I have looked into the kexts and established that the AstekFusion2Family.kext does reference power management in its strings:
Code:
$ strings AstekFusion2Adapter.kext/Contents/MacOS/AstekFusion2Adapter  AstekFusion2Family.kext/Contents/MacOS/AstekFusion2Family  | grep -i -e power -e sleep
%s [%p] registerPowerDriver status = %x
initializePowerManagement
%s [%p] Power management called: Power State -> %d
setPowerState
I'm no expert in macOS kernel/drivers (or kernel/drivers on any system!) and wouldn't know where to begin in a hex editor changing anything - and I suspected that given power management does work in the non-boot case, but not in the boot case, that it would be a bigger change. Not just a case of flipping a flag to say 'do power management' or anything like that.

However increasing timeouts does sound like something that could work in theory, and in AstekFusion2Adapter.kext/Contents/Info.plist there are two timeout keys:
Code:
<key>Read Time Out Duration</key>
    <integer>30000</integer>
<key>SpinDown</key>
    <true/>
<key>Write Time Out Duration</key>
    <integer>30000</integer>
It certainly couldn't hurt to increase the Read Time Out. And turn off SpinDown..

There's also a CLI tool called fusion_client which has an option for disabling spin down:
Code:
$ ./fusion_client --help
./fusion_client: illegal option -- -
Usage: fusion_client -a MPI2_type [-d -r -s]
   <MPI2_type> is 1 - Diagnostic 2 - Astek 3 - OWC
   -n adapter index number
   -d dump diagnostic trace/snapshot buffer
   -r reset IOC
   -p arg - pause on fault [0-disable, 1-enable]
   -l arg - validate license string for adapter
   -c type number pageaddress - show config page
   -e arg - enable spin down [0 -disable, 1-enable]
   -j - eject all target devices, and quiesce the IOC manager
   -f file flash firmware image
   -z options - erase selected flahs regions
   -w 0/wwid - set card wwid (0-use wwid at boot time)
I think I will try those changes. I kind of get into the mindset that it was going to take a binary change to the driver, after I investigated a SASMegaRaid driver for macOS (I think ported from FreeBSD) that had clearly undergone source code changes between its 'no sleep' and 'sleep' versions.

But of course sleep does work in principle with these drivers.. so a simple tweak might be all that's needed to get it to work in the boot case.

Thanks a lot dragonme, that's got me thinking again. I will test this in a minute.
 

dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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@TheBloke

Keep us informed.

Hackintoshing is fun.. but it can be a hair pulling nightmare at times.

Since these astek drivers date all the way back to what.. Mavericks or something.. and there have been numerous changes in power management since.. and actually the Mac Pro hardware that this kext was written for isn’t even supported in high sierra. Probably not sierra either. So I am guessing that there are underlying power management hooks that no longer mesh.

You can sleep/wake.. then sudo pmset -g log in terminal and see what if any messages are in there pertaining to the lsi cards.. grab a look at console as well ... can’t hurt... for system messages, spindumps etc