Marvell SATA 88SE9125/88SE9120

[Bohs Hansen]

Hi

I got a sata controller with the Marvell SATA 88SE9125/88SE9120 chipset. (i think, card-manufacturer says 88SE9123 / 88SE9120).

I highly doubt the drivers are already build into the base version of FreeBSD. But if I get the drivers - do they have to be compiled into a custom version or can they be added from the console later? My guess is I need to compile my own file to setup the server with.

Having a hard time finding anything on Marvell's page though about drivers or systems supported.

Chipset: http://www.marvell.com/products/storage/storage_system_solutions/sata_controllers_pc_consumer/
PCI-Card: http://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/Card.asp?Model=SATA3 Card

 

[matthewowen01]

it should work as long as you set each drive to ahci mode. let us know how it goes.

 

[Bohs Hansen]

got around to test it now that i got the bios update to detect the card. Sadly i can report that the GUI doesn't show me the disks connected to it. It was already formatted as ext4 (but empty), but i should still be able to see it I think. For example when "create new vol", nothing to select.

Might be something hardware based wrong on the card though - will report back if i come up with something.

FN. ver 8, Beta2

 

[joeschmuck]

You would think you could see it but you may need to delete all the partitions on the drives for FreeNAS to recognize the drives. I use Gparted to clean up my drives, just a suggestion. Also, does the system show the drives were mounted at all? Normally it's ada0, ada1, etc... (for me that is)

 

[Bohs Hansen]

After some busy time and some sickness (back pains), I got around to this problem again today. So i thought I post a little update.

A friendly fellow (Mike) with the same problem has PM'd me and is trying to get the same to work and has gotten a bit further then me so far. It seems with the newest beta3 the controller is now recognized, but not fully working yet.
I'm running a "normal setup where he uses FreeNAS as a VM in ESXi with pci-e passthrough and that seems to work better then mine.
He gets a report back about the card (but with errors) and I don't seem to (why i don't know).

Code:

From Mike:
beta3 recognizes it as Marvell 88SE912x while it didnt in the past.
It however still does give me the error returned signal 6.

I tried a "dmesg | grep ahci" but get nothing from the controller, only the 6 onboard ports.

Under /dev/ i got ada0 -> ada4. This should be the boot ssd drive (i think) and the 4 data disks on the onboard controller, but no feedback on the disk attached to the controller.

I don't mind admitting I'm still somewhat of a *nix noob, but I'm learning every day. If anyone got anymore ideas on what to test or what logs to check, I'd appreciate it. Anything i can learn from is good.

Seems the Ubuntu linux ppl got it to work, but the FreeBSD ppl still have a little trouble with this chipset (from what i can find on the web).

Blog posts where other ppl try to get this chip to work on different setups: http://m.blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10#llew-1106061842

 

[Mike]

Let me check in on this one, being I have the same Asrock controller. Since Beta3 the controller is indeed recognized as a Marvell 88SE912X while it wasn't in FreeNAS 7 or 8.
Bohs Hansen got back to be tonight that he has trouble recognizing it, perhaps no capitals in the | grep ?? Rather weird, I will try a boot from a livecd tomorrow and see if it makes any difference composed to esxi with passthrough.

So, it is getting id'ed as a Marvell now but no disks are found in /dev/ or with fdisk apart from ad0 (boot). I'm new to BSD so please bare with me. ;)

Oh, before I forget; AHCI0 (the Asrock sata3 controller) comes up with the following "error"

ahci0: AHCI controller reset failure
device_attach: ahci0 attach returned 6

(not sure if this is because of pci-e passthrough on ESXi, will tackle that one with a real boot tomorrow.)

 

[Bohs Hansen]

Just a little dmesg output from me, in case it helps

Code:

freenas# dmesg | grep Marvell
freenas# dmesg | grep SATA
ahci0: <ATI IXP700 AHCI SATA controller> port 0xf140-0xf147,0xf130-0xf133,0xf120-0xf127,0xf110-0xf113,0xf100-0xf10f mem 0xfeb4b000-0xfeb4b3ff irq 19 at device 17.0 on pci0
ada0: <KINGSTON SS100S216G D100719> ATA-8 SATA 2.x device
ada0: 300.000MB/s transfers (SATA 2.x, UDMA5, PIO 8192bytes)
ada1: <ST2000VX002-1AH166 CV01> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
ada1: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada2: <ST2000VX002-1AH166 CV01> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
ada2: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada3: <ST2000VX002-1AH166 CV01> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
ada3: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
ada4: <ST2000VX002-1AH166 CV01> ATA-8 SATA 3.x device
ada4: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 8192bytes)
freenas# dmesg | grep ahci
ahci0: <ATI IXP700 AHCI SATA controller> port 0xf140-0xf147,0xf130-0xf133,0xf120-0xf127,0xf110-0xf113,0xf100-0xf10f mem 0xfeb4b000-0xfeb4b3ff irq 19 at device 17.0 on pci0
ahci0: [ITHREAD]
ahci0: AHCI v1.20 with 6 6Gbps ports, Port Multiplier supported
ahcich0: <AHCI channel> at channel 0 on ahci0
ahcich0: [ITHREAD]
ahcich1: <AHCI channel> at channel 1 on ahci0
ahcich1: [ITHREAD]
ahcich2: <AHCI channel> at channel 2 on ahci0
ahcich2: [ITHREAD]
ahcich3: <AHCI channel> at channel 3 on ahci0
ahcich3: [ITHREAD]
ahcich4: <AHCI channel> at channel 4 on ahci0
ahcich4: [ITHREAD]
ahcich5: <AHCI channel> at channel 5 on ahci0
ahcich5: [ITHREAD]
ada0 at ahcich0 bus 0 scbus0 target 0 lun 0
ada1 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada2 at ahcich2 bus 0 scbus2 target 0 lun 0
ada3 at ahcich3 bus 0 scbus3 target 0 lun 0
ada4 at ahcich4 bus 0 scbus4 target 0 lun 0