From owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG  Tue Jul 20 21:55:30 2004
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Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 15:54:52 -0600
To: hardware@freebsd.org
From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
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Subject: Dell PERC RAID controller
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Dell has recently announced that the firmware in some of its PERC 
RAID controllers is faulty and should be upgraded. I have a client 
who's running a FreeBSD system with one of these controllers. 
Unfortunately, Dell doesn't consider FreeBSD to be a "supported" 
operating system, and is offering CD-ROMs that install new firmware 
only for Windows or Red Hat Linux. It is unclear how they expect 
one to upgrade under a different OS.

What do folks here know about the problems (which Dell didn't 
describe in detail)? Is the new firmware compatible with FreeBSD's 
drivers? How can one update the firmware from FreeBSD (run their 
Linux update under Linux emulation, perhaps)?

One of the problems I'm facing, while researching this, is that 
Dell uses the name "PERC" for controllers that are actually made by 
at least two third party manufacturers. The messages that this one 
generates at boot time are:

amr0: <AMI MegaRAID> mem 0xfeb00000-0xfeb0ffff irq 7 at device 4.0 on pci0
amr0: <PERC 3/SC> Firmware 1.72, BIOS 3.27, 32MB RAM

...

amrd0: <MegaRAID logical drive> on amr0
amrd0: 51834MB (106156032 sectors) RAID 5 (optimal)

Any help in upgrading the faulty firmware would be MUCH 
appreciated. I don't subscribe to this list full-time, so please 
copy my address on followups.

--Brett Glass