IBM ServeRAID

IBM ServeRAID HBA Driver Project

The project is a driver development for the IBM ServeRAID PCI host bus adapter 4x,5x,6x.

IPS is for short of the IBM ServeRAID driver project. IPS is a SCSA-compliant nexus driver that supports the IBM ServeRAID 4x,5x,6x series HBA.

There are many IBM server user request such driver for installing Solaris on IBM server. IBM ServeRAID 7x, 8x is under development by Sun. However, Sun has no plan to support IBM ServeRAID 4x, 5x, 6x officially. So we can do it on OpenSolaris. The ips driver ports from FreeBSD and only supports basic RAID disk I/O functions.

Goal

• Provide stable and high performance HBA driver for supporting IBM ServeRAID 4x,5x,6x.
• Make Solaris can run on disks connected with IBM ServeRAID controller.

Status

• The prototype has been finished. More test and more enhancement need to be done.
• The diskomizer and tsufs test have been passed on IBM ServeRAID 6M both S10 and Solaris Nevada.

Source Code, Binary, and Package

Latest version is 1.2.

• Source code
• Package for Solaris 10
• Package for Solaris Nevada

How To Use

• Install driver binary manually
  1. Copy ips 32 bit driver to /kernel/drv (i386 platform)
  2. Copy ips 64 bit driver to /kernel/drv/amd64/ (amd64 platform)
  3. add_drv -i '"$DEVICEID"' -c scsi ips
     NOTE: the format of DEVICEID is pcixxxx,xxx
• Install package of ips driver
  1. Copy ips driver package to /export/home
  2. cd /export/home
  3. pkgadd -d ./
  4. Install ips package in terms of prompts

Performance (optional)

Need to do by vdbench 4.0.

Known Problems

• Cannot save core dump.
• Do not support adapter reset.
• Cannot change RAID configuration under Solaris

Discussion

See the driver discuss forum.

Supported Hardware and Platform

• IBM serveRAID-4L
• IBM serveRAID-4lx
• IBM serveRAID-5i
• IBM serveRAID-6m
• IBM serveRAID-6i