Driver for LSI MegaRAID SAS family

[aphex6b]

i had great results with this driver on a LSI 9240-8i with 4x SAS and 4xSATA disks connected to the controller. Even the ' unsafe sleep' worked for me, on Windows i always get BSOD (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED) when i try entering sleep. I wonder if it ever worked on windows 7.

[PhaseMelter]

ElStuiterbal, yes this is possible with hardware RAID card and Parallels.

 

Though if you need a management over that array from the VM guest system, and not OS X you'll need a computer with working VT-D under OS X and a VM software supporting PCI(E) devices passthrough. This is a way too complicated and this is also means that all arrays on that controller will go to the VM.

 

 

Another way is where you find a VM software that could pass logical volume (like software RAID volume, not the underneath physical disks) to the ubuntu in it. Looks like Parallels can't do it such way.

In final, I don't know how http://www.softraid.com/ solution works comparing to builtin OS X software RAID, but if it hides actual physical disks from OS X, than it will work even for Parallels.

In these two options RAID array management is in the hands of OS X.

Thanks again for your reply. I am wondering, how does OSX see a RAID array from a RAID card? Does it see each disk separately, or the array as a single disk?

Because if the RAID card presents the disks as a single disk to OSX, I think you can give Parallels full control.

I will test if I can share a single disk in Ubuntu using Parallels this week before I buy a RAID card. Thanks again!

[dukzcry]

Depends on a kext and a card. My driver doesn't currently support disk passthrough mode, so yes, OS X we'll see an array only as a single disk with any supported controller. And yes, this means that Parallels should work with such.

[PhaseMelter]

Depends on a kext and a card. My driver doesn't currently support disk passthrough mode, so yes, OS X we'll see an array only as a single disk with any supported controller. And yes, this means that Parallels should work with such.

 

Well dukzcry, I have been tinkering some more and I think I do not need Ubuntu at all, since OS X has built-in sharing capabilities. There is however something I am wondering about. If I use a Dell H310 for example, can I initialise the RAID array in the BIOS or will I need to build the array in OS X? And if I build it in OS X, can another OS like Windows read and write to it?

So I guess what I am trying to ask is if a RAID array, on for example the Dell H310 card, is OS independent? Thanks again!

[dukzcry]

Exactly you need to create a RAID array either from controller's BIOS or in Windows/Linux. (There is currently no capability to create/delete arrays from OS X when using this project But you can do monitoring operations with mfiutil console tool supplied with it)

 

After that you can work with your virtual volumes like with usual HDDs, i.e. doing format, reading, writing, etc from any OS supporting your card. Yes, the one of benefits of a true hardware RAID is that they're OS independent solutions when you have drivers for all OSes you need.

[PhaseMelter]

Exactly you need to create a RAID array either from controller's BIOS or in Windows/Linux. (There is currently no capability to create/delete arrays from OS X when using this project But you can do monitoring operations with mfiutil console tool supplied with it)

 

After that you can work with your virtual volumes like with usual HDDs, i.e. doing format, reading, writing, etc from any OS supporting your card. Yes, the one of benefits of a true hardware RAID is that they're OS independent solutions when you have drivers for all OSes you need.

 

Thanks again for your reply! I will try and find a Dell H310 then and report back here as soon as I do. Thanks again

[dukzcry]

Note that at least one person had an issues with RAID-5 setup using H310 card: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285197-driver-for-lsi-megaraid-sas-family/?p=2009371

[flavo]

Dear dukzcry

 

Thanks for all your programming and support!

As a confused man by desease  I always have problem to understand fully all the hackintosh adaptions but I always fight...

I am in doubt with 2 cards, and if you can help to decide with is best I will be more greatefull, so:

 

LSI 8008ELP 39

Fujitsu LSI1078 that they sar its LSI 8708EM2 (256meg ram) 45us

(probably I will pay 150% of taxes because I live in Brazil)

 

So my concerns are about future updates (I am in Mavericks), stability and performance related with:

 

1 OS  X native RAID (for me it has a poor performace (maximum of 100mb/sec with 2 7200 hds) and my board is ga ex58-ud5

2 Sil pcie native card (maximum of 150mb/sec with 2 7200 hds)

3 OSx native FUSION drive.

 

I am a musican and I use my setup as this:

ssd for boot

ssd for record

raid 1 for kontakt libs (this is always critical)

raid 2 for the rest (sometimes critical)

 

So, forgeting the boot ssd I have

7 1,5t hds

4 2t hds

1 ssd

2 1.5t usb portable

 

In my dream of a great performance I am starting to think in creating big raids

4 x2t (8t raid 0) maybe with a ssd fusion (maybe a bad idea because is unstable?)

6 x 1.5t (9t raid 0)

Obviously a half of them backuping each other and 1group with native osx raid (maybe a bad idea because is unstable?)

 

With my experience with raids is that they sometimes fail but  raids with silicon drives diskwarrior always fix and the only way to fix raid with native osx is to reformat and to do a long backup.

 

Sorry for my long lamentations, but if you can say some words about it will be deeply appreciated!

Thanks in advance

[jfive]

As a confused man by desease  I always have problem to understand fully all the hackintosh adaptions but I always fight...

 

As a fellow deranged individual, here's my setup and suggestion to you: Dell PERC H700 (with LSI chip) can be found on eBay for cheap, which have 512MB of cache. Your Kontakt and sample library are very precious, and so is mine. So get an offsite backup running ASAP; such as CrashPlan or similar. It'll take weeks to upload, so get it running immediately after the install has become stable.

 

Regarding the RAID:  https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator

 

The 7-1.5TB HDDs which should be set up as RAID 5 or 6 for speed and redundancy. RAID is NOT a backup!! It's a matter of redundancy and availability (speed) on a production machine. Those seven drives in a RAID 5 would be seen as a single 9TB volume. In the case of RAID 6, it'd be a 7.5TB Way larger than your sample library. NI Kontakt uses a proprietary compression method for it's samples which, in it's most resent release, shrank 43GB down to 25GB-give or a take a few gigs. The my advice, you will never fill 7TB with samples, you'll never be able to finish a track for all of your time will  be spent going through samples. Are you operating a professional recording studio? If yes, I would recommend not using a hacked OS.

 

 

Back to the numbers, seven 1.5TB (RAID5=9TB and RAID6=7.5TB) Let's couple the 9TB or 7.5TB with the other four 2TB drives adding, in a RAID 5 (6TB) or RAID 6 (4TB). You've expressed concerns over array failure so let's play it safe and ditch the motherboard hybrid RAID or OS software RAID. Go with RAID 6 on both cards which equals 11.5TB of storage (7.5TB on one card's array in RAID6 and 4TB on the other, same form). That is an insane amount of storage for an audio production machine likely in your home studio.

 

 

On the flip side, you're trying to chase the speed 'dragon.' Shoot for the Dell H700 with 1GB of cache RAM and deploy the CacheCade 2.0 with two SSDs.  https://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/perc-h700-cachecade.pdf

 

You can get descent IOs using RAID 5 and/or RAID 6 using only cylindrical drives. You don't need to record to an SSD if your machine's motherboard is loaded with RAM.  You can put both of your SSDs in a RAID 1 or RAID 0 on a hardware RAID card for both boot and record purposes. It'll be lightening fast and since you can do a Time Machine or local backup to the RAID array you created with the seven 1.5TB drives or the four 2TB drives.

 

Which brings me to my setup, similar to whats above. On my GA-Z87X-UD4H with a Dell PERC H700i (512MB RAM) two Samsung 840 256GB SSDs in a RAID 1 for boot, two 2TB WD2003FZEX for personal music and photos, etc., and four 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS drives in a RAID 5. Great things about the Dell PERCs is, like most, they RAID arrays are expandable and I can move one or more arrays to a new or replacement card should it become necessary. Be it for a failure or the need to expand the RAID 5 array and shift the boot and personal arrays to a new card.

 

What ever you decide to do, get your offsite backup plan immediately. Unless you got Kontakt and your other samples from th3_p1r4t3_bay, in which case you could steal it again if the machine dies.

[flavo]

Thanks for your kind words!

 

Dont worry about backups, I always use Carbon Copy Cloner incremental backups, and always  compare and delete my kontakt libs with multi libs shirinked and edited. Everything with ncw. Raid 5 & 6 are good but CCC show reports of bad files and I just replace them.

 

In my search I always bypass Dell (I know that perc 5/6 works) because the lots of options and different cables that becames pricier than LSI.

I find a Dell h700 for 115us on ebay with shipping (+150% of taxes because I live in Brazil), and its cheaper than LSI 6gb/s but I do not believe that it worth unless I have a raid of ssds in the future ...?

 

For the hds I have an old 5u large server case that I modified and it handle 15 3.5 hds (for now).

1 of my raids probably will be with a silicon card + fusion with sdd from osx.

 

Well, me and my pocket will meditate about 6gb/s cards, i know that if you intend to use port multipliers or sdds these are a better idea...

 

Thanks again and hugs from Brazil!

[jfive]

Thanks for your kind words!

 

Dont worry about backups, I always use Carbon Copy Cloner incremental backups, and always  compare and delete my kontakt libs with multi libs shirinked and edited. Everything with ncw. Raid 5 & 6 are good but CCC show reports of bad files and I just replace them.

 

In my search I always bypass Dell (I know that perc 5/6 works) because the lots of options and different cables that becames pricier than LSI.

I find a Dell h700 for 115us on ebay with shipping (+150% of taxes because I live in Brazil), and its cheaper than LSI 6gb/s but I do not believe that it worth unless I have a raid of ssds in the future ...?

 

For the hds I have an old 5u large server case that I modified and it handle 15 3.5 hds (for now).

1 of my raids probably will be with a silicon card + fusion with sdd from osx.

 

 

This is going to end here with me since we shouldn't hijack this thread. I addressed your concerns over speed and reliability. RAID 6 will give you TWO drive failues before it becomes a dead array. Again, not sure what you plan on doing with  all this storage (and speed) but you need to be honest with yourself and not want storage just to have storage. You'll go crazy chasing the the 'Gbps Dragon.'The block/stripe size you deploy will play a significant part in speeds with smaller sample files.

 

CCC is good for local but you should have offsite. You seem to be chasing terabytes and Gbps which will cause you to loose focus and inhibit musical creativity. I have a PERC 5i or 6i here. It's yours for free if you want it, just PM me and I'll get it to you ASAP. Only you'd need to pay for shipping. There is also a Tripp-Lite SAS to SATA cable that's brand new. It's yours for the price I paid $14.67USD. Pics here. You'll have to look at the specs to see if they're acceptable. They both work but not sure which FW is loaded. You can read how to deal with the firmware on your own from either Dell or LSI.

 

Now please, begin a new thread to further discuss RAID options and your setup. This thread belongs to dukzcry and is regarding his amazing KEXT which makes all this even possible.

[justroach]

Hello!

 

Just wanted to say again thanks for the work and I love the kext. Might I suggest a GoFundMe for some higher performance cards? SAS 12Gb is looking pretty sweet.

 

 I recently came back to this thread for a new build and noticed that in the README that the IBM ServerRAID M1015 had been crossed out. I've been using one of these cards for a while with good results. I couldn't find a specific post that got the card killed, but...

 

I'd like to give the sleep stuff a shot, but I don't see a Yosemite version with the sleep option available. Could someone post or PM that?

 

Thanks much.

[dukzcry]

flavo,

 

> LSI 8008ELP 39

 

Can't google info about this card 

 

> 8708EM2

 

Mentioned few posts above your post 

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285197-driver-for-lsi-megaraid-sas-family/page-13

Requires fallback to the legacy interrupts (MSI doesn't work with it) by changing plist flag (see FAQ or mentioned posts). Not sure if there's any noticeable performance penalty with this.

 

Instead of raid 0 or raid 0 + OS X raid you could just use an advanced raid level of a decent hardware raid card.

 

However the latest trend for both speed and data safety was usage of a ZFS with RAIDZ. For this you don't need a hardware raid card but you need a good controller without bottlenecks. It could be either a separate pci controller supported by OS X or your mobo controller if it's good enough and has enough hdd connectors. See https://openzfsonosx.org/ project for this. They also have a good forum. You could ask a setup suggestion for your needs there.

 

Also I hope you're more than satisfied with great feedback from jfive.

 

Hi, justroach.

 

> I recently came back to this thread for a new build and noticed that in the README that the IBM ServerRAID M1015 had been crossed out. I've been using one of these cards for a while with good results. I couldn't find a specific post that got the card killed, but...

 

At least:

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285197-driver-for-lsi-megaraid-sas-family/?p=2108649

http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285197-driver-for-lsi-megaraid-sas-family/?p=1908246

 

If you could write the revision of your card, used firmware etc etc I think it could help people and after getting one more positive report on that card we may consider it a compatible card again

 

> I'd like to give the sleep stuff a shot, but I don't see a Yosemite version with the sleep option available. Could someone post or PM that?

 

I've just used an old kexts on Yosemite. There were no API changes in 10.10, so Mavericks kexts should just work for you too. Here's on how to bypass kext signature checking in Yosemite: http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/285197-driver-for-lsi-megaraid-sas-family/page-11?do=findComment&comment=2070470

[PhaseMelter]

Hi dukzcry,

 

I flashed my Dell H310 today with LSI IR firmware and all seems to be well. However, your kext is not loaded by Yosemite and thus, the card is not recognised. Any idea how to proceed?

[dukzcry]

Hi dukzcry,

 

I flashed my Dell H310 today with LSI IR firmware and all seems to be well. However, your kext is not loaded by Yosemite and thus, the card is not recognised. Any idea how to proceed?

 

Hi, ElStuiterbal.

 

Do you boot OS X with kext-dev-mode=1 kernel flag? Because you should! If this doesn't help you may also try to manually load it in booted system via 'kextutil -v /path/to/SASMegaRAID.kext'. This should print you what's going wrong.

[PhaseMelter]

Hi, ElStuiterbal.

 

Do you boot OS X with kext-dev-mode=1 kernel flag? Because you should! If this doesn't help you may also try to manually load it in booted system via 'kextutil -v /path/to/SASMegaRAID.kext'. This should print you what's going wrong.

 

Hi dukzcy,

 

Sorry for my late reply. I just ran your command in Terminal and got the following:

YTBs-iMac:~ root# kextutil -v /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext
Defaulting to kernel file '/System/Library/Kernels/kernel'
Diagnostics for /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext:
Authentication Failures: 
    File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other): 
        /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext
        ._.DS_Store
        Contents
        Info.plist
        ._Info.plist
        MacOS
        SASMegaRAID
        ._SASMegaRAID
        ._MacOS
        ._Contents

Code Signing Failure: not code signed 

By the way, I am running Yosemite with Clover and your kext is in the 10.10 kext folder, as you can see. I hope you can help me.

[dukzcry]

> File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other)

 

Please do cp -r /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext /tmp; chown -R root:wheel /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext; kextutil -v /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext

[glotzer]

Hi dukzcry,

 

first of all: thanks a lot for your work and effort put into this project - it is very much appreciated!!!

 

and also a thanks to the rest of this community around here - been reading for years, never had to ask a question, thanks to the brave people asking for support here before I came to the hackintosh playground.

 

Now I'm stuck with setting up a PERC 6/i Integrated on Yosemite 10.10.3

 

To be honest, this is the first time I'm messing around with raid-devices und such, so there might be a fundamental lack of knowledge regarding this subject on my side. Please forgive me, as I'm here to learn.

 

I managed to get my hands on a PERC 6/i Integrated, which I prepared with some non-electrical tape (as mentioned in the first post - to get it to boot). I also managed to flash the bios of the card to the latest DELL version of the firmware (which can be found here: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=F96NR)

 

After installing via the installer package provided by the link in the first post, I can successfully boot and the controller seems to be recognized:

sudo dmesg | grep SAS

[SASMegaRAID] [Helper] MSI IR line: 1
[SASMegaRAID] DMA: 64-bit, max commands: 1008, max SGE count: 33
[SASMegaRAID] 3 of PDs present
[SASMegaRAID] Enabled options: Physical Drive Coercion Mode  Auto Rebuild  Battery Warning  
[SASMegaRAID] BBU type: BBU, status good, 99% charged 

running the mfiutil I get the following output:

sudo mfiutil show adapter

mfi0 Adapter:
    Product Name: PERC 6/i Integrated
   Serial Number: 1122334455667788
        Firmware: 6.3.3.0002
     RAID Levels: JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, RAID10, RAID50
  Battery Backup: present
           NVRAM: 32K
  Onboard Memory: 256M
  Minimum Stripe: 8K

  Maximum Stripe: 1M 

Using the <Ctrl-R> utility during POST I configured one Disk-Vol-Group with a Virtual Disk being made up of two WD Black 2 TB drives in RAID0 mode. mfiutil seems to display that configuration correctly:

sudo mfiutil show config

mfi0 Configuration: 1 arrays, 1 volumes, 0 spares
    array 0 of 2 drives:
        drive  0 ( 1863G) ONLINE <WDC WD2003FZEX-0 1A01 serial=WD-WMC5C0D3R091> SATA
        drive  1 ( 1863G) ONLINE <WDC WD2003FZEX-0 1A01 serial=WD-WMC5C0D126J9> SATA
    volume mfid0 (3725G) RAID-0 64K OPTIMAL spans:
        array 0

this is the point where I get stuck in the setup process. OSx DiskUtil doesn't show the PERC 6/i controller, so I have no way to access the disks via the GUI.

 

as I said before, this is the first time myself is messing with a RAID-setup. I have the feeling I'm missing something fundamental at this point. Unfortunately I don't even find the right phrases to feed google with.

 

what am I missing here?

 

is there any more information I can provide to solve this issue? as for my hardware-setup, I'm running the PERC 6/i on a Gigabyte Z77-DS3H booting via Osmozis Firmware

 

any hints and help leading in the right direction would be much appreciated.

 

thanks folks - and again big thumbs up, dukzcry

 

cheers

glotzer 

[PhaseMelter]

> File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other)

 

Please do cp -r /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext /tmp; chown -R root:wheel /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext; kextutil -v /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext

 

Thanks for your help. However, I still did not manage to get the kext to work. Please forgive me for maybe not understanding the basics, since I am new to Mac programming.

I did follow your commands and got the following output:

YTBs-iMac:~ root# kextutil -v /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext
Defaulting to kernel file '/System/Library/Kernels/kernel'
Diagnostics for /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext:
Code Signing Failure: not code signed
/tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext appears to be loadable (not including linkage for on-disk libraries).
kext-dev-mode allowing invalid signature -67062 0xFFFFFFFFFFFEFA0A for kext "/tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext"
Loading /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext.
/tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext successfully loaded (or already loaded).

After that, I copied the kext from /tmp to my EFI partition and checked the permissions again, but still no luck. Any idea how to fix this?

YTBs-iMac:~ root# cp -r /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10
YTBs-iMac:~ root# kextutil -v /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext
Defaulting to kernel file '/System/Library/Kernels/kernel'
Diagnostics for /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext:
Authentication Failures: 
    File owner/permissions are incorrect (must be root:wheel, nonwritable by group/other): 
        /Volumes/EFI/EFI/CLOVER/kexts/10.10/SASMegaRAID.kext
        ._.DS_Store
        Contents
        Info.plist
        ._Info.plist
        MacOS
        SASMegaRAID
        ._SASMegaRAID
        ._MacOS
        ._Contents

Code Signing Failure: not code signed

[glotzer]

Hi ElStuiterbal,

 

just a few points (always good to know)

 

1.) OSX (I think with 10.9) started to sign kext-files, so only "valid" drivers would be loaded during startup. That's why you should use the kernel-argument "kext-dev-mode=1" - because the kernel being in "developer-mode" will load kext-files even without a valid signature (which you will only get from Apple-certified software, I'd guess)

 

2.) OSX (I think with 10.7 or 10.8) started to use kernel-cache files. Essentially these files contain all your hardware's needs in regards to drivers (eg. kexts). Try to picture it this way: if you don't have certain kind of hardware in your box, there is no need to for the OS to provide kexts for (meaning loading the stuff into memory would be useless, because drivers will never be needed) - to make use of this concept, OSX builds a kernel-cache file with all drivers included to start up your individual hardware.

 

That being said, consider this:

a.) I'd use some kind of tool (kext-wizard always did me good) to "install" (which is just plain copy & chmod & chown "some.kext" into /S/L/E)

b.) I'd use the same tool to repair permissions and REBUILD KERNEL CACHE (!!!) so OSX will pick up the new kext during next boot (this is essentially just some command-line-kung-fu too, but the novice is better off with some simple tool here)

 

3.) (more or less optional info, because your problem is explained / should be solvable with the above)

OSX (and every other OS like Linux and Windows) is using FAT-formated EFI-partitions when GPT-formated. So technically, since FAT don't know about permissions and such (because it's not build into the filesystem like in HFS+, ext4, NTFS, etc.pp.), setting permissions on the kext on your EFI-partition is more or less useless (if you'r not running some kind of exotic boot-partition setup where you try to boot off of something other than a FAT partition)

 

Placing the kext on your main HDD in "/System/Library/Extensions" you'd need to set permissions on the kext (e.g. "chown -Rv root:wheel ./some.kext && chmod 755 -Rv ./some.kext" - replace some.kext with your needs when in /S/L/E) and then REBUILD KERNEL CACHE (which I don't remember the command now - google should help you) to get the kext loaded on next startup. (loading kexts without booting is possible too, read through this thread, it's written down somewhere)

 

hope to clear things up a little bit - happy hackintosh'ing

 

Cheers

glotzer

[PhaseMelter]

Hi ElStuiterbal,

 

just a few points (always good to know)

 

...

 

Placing the kext on your main HDD in "/System/Library/Extensions" you'd need to set permissions on the kext (e.g. "chown -Rv root:wheel ./some.kext && chmod 755 -Rv ./some.kext" - replace some.kext with your needs when in /S/L/E) and then REBUILD KERNEL CACHE (which I don't remember the command now - google should help you) to get the kext loaded on next startup. (loading kexts without booting is possible too, read through this thread, it's written down somewhere)

 

hope to clear things up a little bit - happy hackintosh'ing

 

Cheers

glotzer

 

Thank you very much for your reply glotzer! I will try tomorrow to just install the kext in S/L/E. However, I would prefer to use Clover to inject the kext, to keep S/L/E as vanilla as possible.

Your explanation on the working principles of kexts and OSX does really help, which I find very interesting. However, could you explain why other kexts work if they are injected by Clover?

[dukzcry]

Hi glotzer,

Have you tried solutions for "device doesn't show up in profiler" and "contiguous drive enumeration" in FAQ? Does any of these change anything for you? You may also try to combine them if any single solution doesn't change the things.

 

ElStuiterbal ,

> /tmp/SASMegaRAID.kext successfully loaded (or already loaded).

 

Obviously this means that your kext was loaded :-) Please look at dmesg and Profiler after such successful load. Your dmesg buffer should have similar info messages akin to what glotzer posted. Next comes look at Profiler (Parallel SCSI section) and Disk Utility. You should see at least your controller in Profiler; and volume(s) in both utilities, if you have created any virtual disk in your controller bios. If you're stuck in the middle, try what was suggested to glotzer. Ah, and post things like your dmesg etc here so it will be more easy to figure what's going on.

 

As for kext loading, glotzer made a great explanation.

 

> I will try tomorrow to just install the kext in S/L/E

 

No need, you already successfully loaded the kext ;-) Keep on testing like I described few paragraphs before.

 

> However, could you explain why other kexts work if they are injected by Clover?

> However, I would prefer to use Clover to inject the kext, to keep S/L/E as vanilla as possible.

 

Probably because no other non-storage related kext require this:

 

 

Local-Root

This kext is required to mount root on a local volume—for example, the storage family, disk drivers, or file systems.

For me, kext injection worked fine prior to Apple introduced this kext validation bullsh*t.

Anyway, you should finish manual testing prior to continuing with kext injection.

[glotzer]

Hi dukzcry, ElStuiterbal

 

 

 

However, could you explain why other kexts work if they are injected by Clover?

 

 

always wondered about that one, too

 

 

 

 

Local-Root

This kext is required to mount root on a local volume—for example, the storage family, disk drivers, or file systems.

 

 

and thanks to dukzcry's hint, this makes perfectly sense now - good one, me just didn't see the forest because of all those trees.

 

@topic:

 

1.) booted with the "uncontiguous enumeration" kext --> device (adapter card) didn't even show up in profiler

2.) changed in Info.plist "PreferMSI" flag to false --> device (adapter card) is shown in profiler, still not showing any HDD devices or adapter card in "Disk Utility.app"

 

noticable: 

If I connect an old 2.5 SATA 100GB HDD and configure it as RAID0 (single drive) --> adapter card shows up in profiler and all partitions on disk get recognized by "Disk Utility.app"

If I configure those 2 WD BLACK drives the same way --> adapter card shows up in profiler, again nothing in "Disk Utility.app" (same as 2. above basically)

 

suspicion:

I'm running a dedicated GPU in the PCIe 16x slot. Using the (only remaining) slot with the PERC 6/i (needing PCIe 8x), wiring on the board might not support faster connection than PCIe 4x.

 

next try for solution:

Removing the dedicated GPU (thus loosing those fancy mini-display ports for my monitors) and moving the PERC 6/i in the no-occupied-by-GPU PCIe slot. Thought I could get around looking for cables/adapters in the basement - but hey, spring-time-clean-up comin' up anyway.

 

question:

might this be an issue at all? as far as I understand, running the PERC 6/i in a PCIe 4x slot will just impact transfer rate

(meaning: not getting full SATA-speed - as transfer rate is again something different, if me reading through your errata on the unsafe settings kext got that right)

 

will try to remove the dedicated GPU and report back with results - just give me a few days.

 

Cheers

glotzer

[dukzcry]

Hi.

 

What confuses me is that

 

> [SASMegaRAID] 3 of PDs present

 

You have 3 physical disks attached to a raid card.

 

> mfi0 Configuration: 1 arrays, 1 volumes, 0 spares

> array 0 of 2 drives

 

Only two of which are used in a raid array.

Have you ever tried to disconnect non-involved one(s) from the card?

 

> might this be an issue at all? as far as I understand, running the PERC 6/i in a PCIe 4x slot will just impact transfer rate

Not likely. I'm more with your last sentence.

 

You may also try io debug and full debug kexts and compare kernel buffer messages on when you use just that that old 100 gb drive and when you use 2x 2 tb drives (meanwhile, what about creating raid0 of single 2 tb drive or raid1 of both? Does it work?) to see where it stucks with your 4 tb raid volume. Am I right that it works fine on your side under another OS, like Windows?

[justroach]

ARRRGGGHHH!!!

 

Tearing my hair out here. Finally went for a 9260-8i. Built it up on a DZ77GA-70K with Yosemite and Clover. Created a virtual device. No drive though. RAID 0, 1, 5, and 6. System information shows the device (LUN Address: 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00), but Disk Utility doesn't.

 

WTF am I doing wrong?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

LSI 9260-8i FW= 12.15.0-0205

Latest Yosemite and Clover...

 

mfiutil sees the volumes just fine...

 

Tried flipping PreferMSI with no difference.

 

Tried uncontiguous enumeration with no difference.

 

TIA for any help.

 

UPDATE:

 

I swapped a known working card into the system and experienced the same results. I took the non-working 9260 out and put it into a known working system and everything worked.

 

@glotzer

I think you may be into something. I think some of these desktop board's PLX PCIe switching is causing problems. I noticed when the card was in the x16 slot for the GPU would show as x8. I was using a GTX580, BTW. I didn't try the small drives like you had, but as I mentioned the problem followed the motherboard and not the card. lspci showing any unknown PLX devices?

 

@dukzcry

 

Any idea how we could troubleshoot or test that theory?