LSI 2308 (9217-8i) on Solaris 11.3?

[TheBloke]

Hey all

I got my first LSI SAS HBA this week (LSI SAS 2008) and now want to get a second for my home file server running Solaris 11.3.

I've found a good deal on a used LSI 9217-8i with the SAS 2308 chipset. It's priced the same as an OEM 9211-8i/SAS2008 but it's in the UK so I can get it delivered much quicker, and the 2308 chip has the benefit of PCIE 3 bandwidth. I may well never need the extra bandwidth, but it's always nice to have the option; maybe in future I'll want to run a bunch of SSDs off the LSI.

The 2308 is certified in the Solaris 10 HCL, but not for 11. Some googling shows me this blog post, where the author got the 2308 running on Solaris 11.1, but only by copying over the mpt* drivers/config from OmniOS. Before he did that his system hung on boot after loading mpt_sas. He was using ESXi, passing the HBA through to Solaris in a VM, but I am assuming the issues he faced would be comparable to real hardware.

I could probably get it working in the same way by copying OmniOS drivers, but that doesn't sound ideal: it worked for Solaris 11.1 but there's no saying it'll still work in 11.3, even if it does it could break in future releases, and/or it might introduce subtle issues that are hard to debug.

So my question is: does anyone know have any other experience of the 2308 on Solaris 11? Might there be any other way to get it to work other than copying the drivers from an Illumos-based OS?

For example, I find it odd that it's fully supported in Solaris 10 but not in 11. Maybe the Solaris 11 driver does support it, it just needs to be added to /etc/driver_aliases or some other config file? Perhaps they just didn't bother certifying it for 11, and hence removed some config but not the driver code? I'm probably being too optimistic, especially given that guy's experience of the system hanging (rather than just not detecting the card), but I thought it worth asking.

If anyone has any experience and/or has got this chip to work in Solaris 11, I'd be most grateful for any info. I don't want to buy the card until I have more info, and if there's any doubt I'll just get another SAS2008. It'd just be nice if this card was viable, as it's both cheap and quick-to-get.

TB

 

[TheBloke]

An update: I didn't buy the 9217-8i, but I have just bought a used 9207-8e. Surprisingly enough, the 9207-8e is listed in the Solaris 11 HCL. I therefore don't understand why the 9217-8i wouldn't also have worked; I found that blog post indicating it didn't work at least as of Solaris 11.1, but maybe it could have been made to work with a config file change as I was asking about in this thread.

Anyway, it does seem that 9207-8e should definitely work out of the box, so hopefully I will be successful with this card.

I wanted an 8e card as I've just bought a new (used) server. I had been looking to replace my consumer-grade Asus motherboard with a different mobo that would give me more PCIE x8 slots, but then I found a great deal on a 2U Chenbro chassis with 12 hot swap bays, LGA 1366 motherboard with 2 x quad core Xeons, and 2 x LSI 9211-4i. It worked out only a little more expensive than it would have cost me to buy a new motherboard + CPUs for my existing chassis.

I plan to have 12 drives in the new chassis and 8 in my existing 3U 16-drive chassis, using the 8e card to run 2 x 8088 cables between them.

Server should be here tomorrow and the 9207-8e on Saturday so FWIW I'll post again to confirm it works fine.

 

[TheBloke]

To update in case it's of use to future searchers:

I now have two 2308 cards, the 9207-8e and 9205-8e. The 9207 is certified up to and including Solaris 11.3 and as expected works fine. The 9205 is only certified for Solaris 10, but also works fine.

I do wonder if this means that the 9217-8i would also work - I can't honestly think of why it shouldn't work. However one difference with the 9205 is that it has been discontinued - I think this is why it's no longer certified in Solaris 11. The 9217-8i is still available, so its lack of certification in Solaris 11 might mean more. Also there is the evidence of the blog user who found it definitely didn't work as of Solaris 11.1.

I have PCI-E 2.0 slots so I have no real reason to bother getting a 9217-8i, so I doubt I'll test this any time soon. If it doesn't work I would wonder if there might be a simple fix, like editing the PCI-E config to add the identification for the 9217-8i (eg /etc/driver_aliases), as there's no doubt the 2308 chipset works fine.

 

[daleg]

One must understand the sometimes dark world of hardware HCLs. Your 9207 and 9217 might have the exact same controller chip on the pcboard and the only effective physical difference might be that some leads from it are electrically connected for an extra plug, but since the 9217 wasn't actually tested and it could ship with a different firmware variant than that tested on the the 9207, it wasn't included on the list. Especially with LSI HBAs, whether something works (or works well) can largely depend on the firmware that's loaded. Most of the time you're ok, but there have been some buggy firmware revs from LSI in the past that necessitated people to downgrade before a fixed rev was released.