[nycbug-talk] highpoint RAID drivers on FreeBSD

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Charles,

On Dec 13, 2004, at 2:39 PM, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Isaac Levy wrote:
>
>> The nutshell version, the HighPoint has FreeBSD drivers for their 
>> 1640 SATA RAID card on their website, it's just the installing disk 
>> drivers on boot volumes that bites.  These things are cheap, solid, 
>> SATA RAID- who doesn't want that? (regardless if I want it, I've now 
>> got one :)
>>
>> If anyone can point me to the right person, or URL, I'd seriously 
>> appreciate it- this situation is right on the cusp of being VERY 
>> cool, IMHO.
>
> Can you tell us more about the driver?

I'll try here- I've not gotten it successfully installed here today- 
I'm working around the problem that I don't have a floppy drive on the 
machine, and the drivers are distributed as floppy images...  Taking 
forever to shuffle disks around here.

> Is it tacked-on to the existing ATA stuff, or is it more like the 
> 3Ware (which presents itself more like a scsi device to the OS)?

I'm not really familiar with the internals of the 3Ware drivers, but I 
*think* it's similar- the docs say it presents itself as  /dev/da0 to 
the filesystem.  Additionally, after install, the sysctl interface to 
the RAID is done like:
# sysctl hpt374.status
-and-
# sysctl ?w hpt374.status=?hpt rebuild a,b,0?
-etc-

So I'm not sure if that answers your question or not here- but perhaps 
it provides some more clues?

> If the latter, a quick shout on -hackers should find you the right 
> person.  A few people that may or may not work on this stuff but are 
> quite smart and easy to work with are:
>
> -Mike Smith (really really great guy - if he's got the time and the 
> commit bit, he'd probably help)
> -Scott Long (mostly adaptec stuff, but who knows...)

Excellent- thank you!

>
> And while I appreciate Soren's work, he's not the most cooperative or 
> helpful person in the group, so I'd steer clear.
>
> Again, if this is a more scsi-like driver, asking on -scsi is good - 
> most anyone who works on any RAID cards is going to be there.
>
> Charles

Cool- much thanks Charles.

Rocket-
.ike