# Broadcom 9480 (SAS3516) and FreeBSD 11.2-RELEASE



## smokey7722 (Jul 13, 2018)

On FreeBSD 11.1 I had to manually upgrade the kernel or modules to get support for the 9480 raid controller I have in a chassis (using the MR_FREEBSD_DRIVER_MRSAS_7.5-07.705.01.00.tgz package from Broadcom directly).  I just upgraded the machine to 11.2 and unfortunately it looks like despite the man pages saying the mpr driver should support the SAS3516 chip I haven't been able to get it to work. 

I've tried manually upgrading to the newest drivers again though they don't state they support 11.2 (only up to 11.1).

I was hoping someone may be able to assist in narrowing down the cause as this is very odd that it doesn't work despite things saying they should.


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## smokey7722 (Jul 15, 2018)

If anyone has a recommendation of a better place to ask I can go there too if the appropriate folk don't visit these forums.  I can look and try to figure out which mailing list would be appropriate or contact the maintainer of the mpr driver as well I guess.


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## SirDice (Jul 16, 2018)

I'm not sure if it'll work for this card but newer LSI cards use the mrsas(4) driver. Judging by the filename of driver you downloaded it may work for you.


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## smokey7722 (Jul 16, 2018)

SirDice that did work in 11.1 but seems to not be working in 11.2.  In 11.1 I didn't need to do anything but set mrsas_load="YES" in the loader.conf however in 11.2 that doesn't seem to work.  I think that 11.2 updated the mrsas driver but its still not current and the one they included in the kernel now seems to be a problem with loading it as a module so I need to custom compile a kernel with either the updated or strip it all out and use the modules to test today.


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## SirDice (Jul 16, 2018)

Make sure to set this in /boot/loader.conf too:

```
hw.mfi.mrsas_enable="1"
```
If you don't set this the mfi(4) driver has precedence and might fail to detect the card.


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## smokey7722 (Jul 16, 2018)

Thanks, I tried that a moment ago and it looks like the mrsas in the kernel (older it seems?) is still loading which is why I was thinking of rebuilding the kernel.  I would love to avoid that though, I would prefer to keep things vanilla if I could.

dmesg grepped for mrsas shows:

```
module_register: cannot register pci/mrsas from kernel; already loaded from mrsas.ko
Module pci/mrsas failed to register: 17
```

kldstat shows:

```
Id Refs Address            Size     Name
1    4 0xffffffff80200000 2036810  kernel
2    1 0xffffffff82238000 1f718    mrsas.ko
```


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## SirDice (Jul 16, 2018)

The mrsas(4) driver is already part of GENERIC so it shouldn't need to be loaded. I suspect you're actually loading the Broadcom driver instead. That one will likely conflict with the existing mfi(4) and mrsas(4) drivers that came with FreeBSD.


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## smokey7722 (Jul 16, 2018)

Right, whats odd is the 11.1 GENERIC one that was included in the kernel had no problems allowing me to swap the .ko files with the updated ones and loading the drivers manually as a module in this way.  11.2 seems to have changed that now.  I guess short term my only option is to compile a custom kernel without them included and long term - the ones included don't work and need to be looked at by the appropriate folks, though I am not sure who.


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## smokey7722 (Jul 17, 2018)

Yup I compiled a kernel removing all traces of the drivers in it (mpr, mpt, mfi, mrsas, etc).  Loaded the mrsas kernel module from Broadcom and it works great.  So theres definitely an update needed still in the source.  Any direction on how I report it?  Do I just email the maintainer for mrsas?


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## smokey7722 (Aug 19, 2018)

So far I haven't been able to make any progress in trying to get the code updated.  The problem is the above testing was on a drive not ON the controller and now I have to build the production server which will have a pair of drives mirrored using the controller.  If I can't install the OS I can't modify the kernel as needed by either updating the src files or removing the drivers from the kernel entirely and using updated kernel modules.  Unless theres another way I don't know of (short of building a custom release iso to use for installation).  I sent emails out to a whole bunch of folk a few minutes ago from the 11.2 release engineering team as I'm out of ideas.  Hopefully I can get some direction soon.


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