LSI/Avago HBA - no boot from anything but a single mirror

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Hi all,

this is not a TrueNAS system but plain FreeBSD, but the density of people "knowing this stuff" in this forum is quite high, so please permit me to give it a shot.

• Supermicro systems with onboard LSI/Avago SAS HBA
• HBA flashed to IT mode
• SATA SSDs connected and working
• Booting from a single mirror pool works fine
• As soon as there is more than the first disk necessary to read the kernel from the pool the system won't boot
• Independent of EFI or legacy boot - the boot loader starts fine, but cannot load the kernel

The system refusing to boot (2x mirror) looks like this on the console:


I suspect this to be the reason:


How can I tell the Avago HBA to present all 4 drives to the BIOS? Trying to invoke the builtin config utility via Ctrl-C leads to a system hanging with "DXE--Legacy OPROM Initialization.._" and no progress. The HBA does not offer to invoke the "WebBIOS" with Ctrl-H - probably intentionally because IT mode.

Thanks for any hints,
Patrick

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Is it remotely possible that an IT mode HBA can generally boot from the first drive only?

 

[jgreco]

Is it remotely possible that an IT mode HBA can generally boot from the first drive only?

No, but it's totally possible that the option ROM (the thing that runs during BIOS POST) is not recognizing what's going on if you didn't flash the ROM and are using the Supermicro ROM image. It is this part of the system that is responsible for populating the boot device list for the BIOS.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I flashed the device with a 16.00 version IT mode firmware I received from Supermicro after I opened a support ticket. Re-flash with Avago?

 

[jgreco]

Well, I would suspect the problem to be the option ROM, not the firmware. I can understand if you're hesitant to mess with that.

I have a bunch of Supermicro systems for one client where we can't update the BIOS to latest or else the Dell LSI RAID controllers lock up the system during POST (which indicates some option ROM B/S going on). I have battled this stuff for years and I often find solutions only after extensive experimentation and lots of wasted time. I'll be happy to buy you a beer and discuss frustrations sometime. ;-)

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Thanks for your support. For the moment we decided to use only single mirror boot pools in these chassis. We have a handful of them, bought at a time when no other systems without an integrated LSI HBA were available.