RHEL 8.0 and LSI SAS 2008 controllers

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theoriginalguru
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Joined: 2009/04/10 08:08:31

RHEL 8.0 and LSI SAS 2008 controllers

Post by theoriginalguru » 2018/11/28 22:54:04

i'm realizing this issue only recently about the deprecated mpt2sas device drivers, and the eventual removal of the driver in RHEL 8. I find this move by RHT very short sighted, as SAS2008 chipset (along with all the other ones they plan to remove like 2108, 2208, 2116, and the megasas ones too) is still very relevant today so long as you're using SAS-2/SATA-III HDDs. I think there's still a role for traditional HDD storage (bulk storage, media storage, backup servers, etc.), and using a SAS-3 controller on HDDs is a huge waste of money. Not to mention, these LSI controllers are very, very widely deployed still under many brands other than LSI (HP, Dell, IBM, Lenovo, etc. all have rebranded LSI SAS controllers).

So, I have two thoughts I want to share and gather the community's feedback:

1) Do you also agree that the list of drivers to be removed is a bad idea?

1.1) If so, what can we do about it? Can we change RHT's mind on this decision? How would the community go about opening this discussion with RHT?

2) If RHT goes forward without these drivers in RHEL8, and that eventually becomes CentOS 8, what can be done in the CentOS community to support these drivers? Can we create an extra driver kernel sub-package? Can we simply change the kernel config so that it does include support for those drivers? Is that a bad idea, considering RHT will no longer be maintaining that portion of the driver code? (although, I think the driver is very mature at this point)

Thoughts?

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avij
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Re: RHEL 8.0 and LSI SAS 2008 controllers

Post by avij » 2018/11/28 23:03:29

My thought is that it'd be nice if you would not mix CentOS 7.x and RHEL 8 beta. They are entirely different, so I've split your message to a new topic.

Ingvarhost
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Joined: 2013/11/22 10:07:08

Re: RHEL 8.0 and LSI SAS 2008 controllers

Post by Ingvarhost » 2018/11/29 03:40:04

In Fedora 29 mpt3sas driver supports these controllers. It seems that RedHat in 8.0 removed mpt2sas and disabled support for sas2 controllers in mpt3sas. It is possible that it can be activated back.

theoriginalguru
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Re: RHEL 8.0 and LSI SAS 2008 controllers

Post by theoriginalguru » 2018/12/04 07:36:41

Ingvarhost wrote:
2018/11/29 03:40:04
In Fedora 29 mpt3sas driver supports these controllers. It seems that RedHat in 8.0 removed mpt2sas and disabled support for sas2 controllers in mpt3sas. It is possible that it can be activated back.
So you are thinking option #2 in my OP? Would it make sense just to enable some of these devices in the mpt3sas driver? Or break it out as a separate driver? I guess it looks like mpt2sas supported devices got merged with mpt3sas...

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