sas disks connected to 3ware sas controllers support

[art9]

Please add support of sas disks connected to 3ware sas controllers if possible. I can give access to linux box with 3ware controller and sas disks if necessary.

[samm2]

Please provide more information about current state of support

[jc-ol]

Hello, can I help in any way with this? I have access to 3ware 9750 controllers with SAS drives. At the moment it seems that smartmontools only pass SATA commands to the driver, not SAS commands, as discussed in this ticket: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/ticket/86

I am sure that a lot of nearline SAS disks behind 9750 controllers wait for being monitored....

Best regards,
Jakob Curdes jc@…

[jc-ol]

File shows result of smartmontools command for 9750 w/SAS drives

[chrfranke]

Hello, can I help in any way with this?

Do you have any info whether SCSI/SAS pass-through support for physical disks exist in recent 9750 linux driver versions? This is required for smartmontools SAS support.

[jc-ol]

I can ask @3ware support. Will get back when I have an answer.
jc

[samm2]

Last time when i was looking in the headers i found SCSI (SAS) format support. I never tested it because i do not have access to such configuration.

[jc-ol]

ok, how could I test that?

[samm2]

Try to write a simple program to get, for example, device name or serial :) Or, if you can provide root access to such box (it should be NOT IN PRODUCTION) i can try this myself, but know i am a little busy on a primary job.

[jc-ol]

I am not a "real" programmer. If somebody wants to lend me a piece of code I can try to manage. Sadly I cannot just give root access as the boxes are in the customer's enviroment, though not all in production. We have a 9750 but without the SAS disk behind it.

[jc-ol]

Hm. I got an answer from 3ware but I think it is not really helpful:

"Hello, I found out that the popular SMART monitoring tool 'smartmontools' is not able to read smart info from a SAS disk behind a 9750 series controller. The developers say: "Do you have any info whether SCSI/SAS pass-through support for physical disks exist in recent 9750 linux driver versions? This is required for smartmontools SAS support." So I pass this question on to you. Monitoring SATA disks behind a 9750 controller is no problem and works flawlessly. Best regards, Jakob Curdes

Resolution:
Jakob, SAS monitoring with smartmontools is not currently supported on 3ware 9690 and 9750 cards. It may be in the future."

Well, we KNEW that it is not supported with smartmontools; but this is not what I asked. I asked if SAS pass-through is implemented.

Okay, probably we need to do this on our own. Where in the code can I start if I want to monitor a SAS disk ?

[chrfranke]

Replying to jc-ol:

... Where in the code can I start if I want to monitor a SAS disk ?

First examine headers and code of the Linux kernel driver for 3ware 9750. Is there any evidence that a SCSI pass-through is implemented? If yes: is any documentation or sample code available somewhere?

[panticz2]

Hello Smartmontools Team,

i can provide you an access to a machine with a 3ware 9750 raid controller and SAS discs or some development outputs.

Please lets me know if i can help

BR

Pawel

[samm2]

I am going to close this ticket as "wont fix". Some final comments:

1) ioctl on modern controllers allows to send SCSI packets, but there are no examples or manual and it is unclear is it possible at all to speak with drive directly. It is possible that this interface is only for exported arrays.
2) I requested information from 3ware/LSI but got no response at all.
3) twcli also not showing any smart related info on SAS drives.

So if you want this feature to be implemented - please ask 3ware about ioctl interface for SAS drives under RAID controller.