[OpenIndiana-discuss] status of the PERC H310 in OI?

[Tim Mooney]

Hi All!

I've only been on the list for a couple months and am therefore relatively
new to OpenIndiana and other OpenSolaris successors, though I have a long
history with Solaris.

I asked on the list on May 20th about recommendations for a desktop
workstation and received a lot of really good responses:

   http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2013-May/012815.html

Because my coworkers were all going with the Dell T3600, I did as well.
I've booted OI 151a7 from the Live USB and it recognizes all the hardware
except the USB 3 controller (as expected), the Intel Management Engine
Interface (MEI) (no big deal), and the PERC H310 controller (also expected).

As Udo mentioned in the earlier post he referenced:

   http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2013-May/012815.html

The PERC H310 doesn't have a driver in oi151a7.  oi151a7 reports it as an
LSI Falcon 2008.

I could rip out the PERC if necessary, but I wanted to explore all options
before doing that.

Udo mentions an imr_sas driver, which I have been unable to find.  There's
an interesting blog post here:

   http://www.byte.nl/blog/how-to-install-opensolaris-openindiana-on-an-m1015-lsi-9240-raid-controller/

about the imr_sas driver and an older version of OI, but it appears that LSI
no longer provides Solaris drivers for their MegaRaid cards, as most pages
involving Solaris just redirect to Oracle.

Rob Johnson asked about reflashing the PERC H310 back in January:

   http://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana-discuss/2013-January/011167.html

Others have asked about the same thing on the ZFS list, e.g.

   http://thr3ads.net/zfs-discuss/2013/01/2167300-Has-anyone-used-a-Dell-with-a-PERC-H310

All of that background brings me to the questions.

- What's the status of the PERC H310 in OI (and/or Illumos)?  Is there a
   driver that will be included in oi151a8?

- Assuming there isn't a Live (devel) release of oi151a8 that's imminent,
   and assuming someone can provide me the clues necessary to find the imr_sas
   driver, is it relatively simple to load updated drivers with the oi151a7
   Live release, so I can actually install on the hard drives that are behind
   the PERC right now?  The blog post about installing on the lsi 9240 looked
   pretty straightforward, the only missing parts were the bitrot related to
   LSI's web site and the actual driver.

- Barring an actual PERC H310 driver and oi151a8 pre-release, can anyone
   provide some guidance on cross-flashing the PERC with the appropriate LSI
   firmware?  Is that process (relatively) easily reversible?

Thanks for any insight people can provide.

PS: Last time I installed Solaris was for 10/08 via the text-based installer.
I had never seen any of the updates or improvements from OpenSolaris and
successors until I booted into OI151a7.  I accidentally booted the
screen-reader version and my coworkers were pretty amused that something
Solaris-ish was talking to me right out of the box.  I personally was
shocked at how simple the device driver update GUI made it to see what
drivers were missing.  I'm definitely looking forward to getting OI running!

Thanks,

Tim
-- 
Tim Mooney                                             Tim.Mooney at ndsu.edu
Enterprise Computing & Infrastructure                  701-231-1076 (Voice)
Room 242-J6, IACC Building                             701-231-8541 (Fax)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105-5164