C600 raid

C600 raid

[Marcus Sorensen]

Can someone remind me, is the C600 chipset "raid-1" an md-raid with
the intel metadata, or is it dm-raid compatible like other fakeraid
drivers, or something else?

Re: C600 raid

[Jiang, Dave]

On Thu, 2013-10-24 at 04:31 +0000, Marcus Sorensen wrote:
> Can someone remind me, is the C600 chipset "raid-1" an md-raid with
> the intel metadata, or is it dm-raid compatible like other fakeraid
> drivers, or something else?

The C600 series chipset is a SAS controller. Depending on the SKU of the
chipset the OROM/EFI driver will enable or disable RAID5. Otherwise the
OROM should at least support RAID0 and RAID1. It uses the external IMSM
metadata. That means you can have MDRAID manage the RAID volumes, and
the RAID0 and RAID1 can be managed with DMRAID as well. Although Intel
no longer supports DMRAID usage for its external metadata and recommends
using MDRAID for management. 

Re: C600 raid

[Jiang, Dave]

On Thu, 2013-10-24 at 16:33 +0000, Marcus Sorensen wrote:
> Thanks. In the past with onboard controllers like this I've set up the
> array in the boot menu, and then when installing the OS the kernel has
> automatically spun it up as a device mapper disk. I'm assuming that
> the bios menu tools write the MD metadata such that an installer with
> MD modules would do the same.

I think it entirely depends on the distro. I know for sure that SLES,
RHEL, and Fedora has the proper support for installing to and booting
from IMSM RAID volumes. 

> 
> On Oct 24, 2013 9:57 AM, "Jiang, Dave" <dave.jiang@intel.com> wrote:
>         On Thu, 2013-10-24 at 04:31 +0000, Marcus Sorensen wrote:
>         > Can someone remind me, is the C600 chipset "raid-1" an
>         md-raid with
>         > the intel metadata, or is it dm-raid compatible like other
>         fakeraid
>         > drivers, or something else?
>         
>         The C600 series chipset is a SAS controller. Depending on the
>         SKU of the
>         chipset the OROM/EFI driver will enable or disable RAID5.
>         Otherwise the
>         OROM should at least support RAID0 and RAID1. It uses the
>         external IMSM
>         metadata. That means you can have MDRAID manage the RAID
>         volumes, and
>         the RAID0 and RAID1 can be managed with DMRAID as well.
>         Although Intel
>         no longer supports DMRAID usage for its external metadata and
>         recommends
>         using MDRAID for management.