Possible use of driver for HP SmartArray P400(cciss)

Issues related to hardware problems
mdella
Posts: 2
Joined: 2017/02/14 20:47:27

Re: Possible use of driver for HP SmartArray P400(cciss)

Post by mdella » 2017/02/15 18:01:43

Ok, a TREMENDOUS amount of further work done only to discover that there is nothing I can *currently* do about this. Some things I have discovered with further experimentation...

1. You do not apparently need the kmod-cciss.x86_64 driver module for this to work. The hpsa module is enough.
2. There is a bug that in the hpsa module that was introduced NOV2016 as a fix for other problems (the fix created a problem). This bug is what prevents the P400 from being recognized as a driver. It also causes consistant entries in your dmesg log about an error that will not be fixed until another patch is released for the hpsa module.

What happened that prevented it from working was that the older RAID controllers started their first drive as SCSI target 0 reporting to the OS. Additionally the controller itself was also reporting 0. There was a patch created that was supposed to detect the collisions and move the controller over to slot 3 (by default) but if your controller didn't respond to SCSI v5 correctly, it wasn't detected as a controller (the P400 is old enough that it had this problem).

What this created was a situation where the P400 tried to register itself with the SCSI system and it used the same registration ID as the first drive hence causing a conflict. As such, you'd see the error:

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[time] hpsa 0000:06:00.0: scsi 2:0:0:0: added RAID    HP    P400i   controller SSDSmartPathCap- En- Exp=1
[time] hpsa 0000:06:00.0: addition failed -19, device not added.
So the controller never gets added to the device chain. The system/drives work fine (they all were correctly added using the hpsa driver as listed in my last post) but your hpacucli program won't. This means that you can't look at the SMART status, drive status, controller status, etc while the machine is running. Your only option is to look at it during the reboot/controller initialization phase.

This issue was raised as a bug and is being addressed as of JAN2017. I do not know however when the fix will be released into the kernel patches nor how long it will take to propagate down to my level. But at least I'm not spinning my wheels trying to figure this one out anymore. I can live with the constant log entries about the failed insertion, at least until the patch comes out.

So... in summary...

I only did the "hpsa.hpsa_simple_mode=1 hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1" on both the install and the grub update to get things to work. It does require that your P400 firmware is >v4.0 to work (or even the hpsa can't find it). v7.22 is the last "free" version out there that I was able to find although the latest is actually v7.24 (with fixes that I'd like, but free support from HP is difficult, even for an HP employee). Your BIOS must be dated later than 2008 for this to work as well.

Easiest solution for the firmware problems of your DL360G5? Use the Smart Firmware DVD v10.10 (last free version) located at http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/pub ... 925937f38b to burn a DVD and autoupdate with it. Running it on my machines found typically around 30 things to update (even the hard disk firmware amazingly enough). Sadly, the last patches you really want for your DL360G5 are from around 12/2012 whereas the last free update was 06/2012. If anyone has the Firmware ISO from 2013 or later, I'd love to hear from you.

Marcos

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TrevorH
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Re: Possible use of driver for HP SmartArray P400(cciss)

Post by TrevorH » 2017/02/15 18:04:17

OTOH, HP P410's are about US$50 on ebay...
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

cklus
Posts: 2
Joined: 2017/02/16 20:44:56

Re: Possible use of driver for HP SmartArray P400(cciss)

Post by cklus » 2017/02/16 22:56:26

mdella wrote: Easiest solution for the firmware problems of your DL360G5? Use the Smart Firmware DVD v10.10 (last free version) located at http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/pub ... 925937f38b to burn a DVD and autoupdate with it. Running it on my machines found typically around 30 things to update (even the hard disk firmware amazingly enough). Sadly, the last patches you really want for your DL360G5 are from around 12/2012 whereas the last free update was 06/2012. If anyone has the Firmware ISO from 2013 or later, I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks for the info!

I was able to find the v7.24 RAID controller firmware on the HP site here: http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/pub ... wEnvOid=54 (CP017698.scexe)

To install it, I took the Smart Firmware DVD and installed it to USB via the HP USB Key utility. After it finished, I placed the CP017698.scexe file in the HPFWUP1010\hp\swpackages folder. Running through the interactive firmware update process installed it to the system.

tunk
Posts: 1205
Joined: 2017/02/22 15:08:17

Re: Possible use of driver for HP SmartArray P400(cciss)

Post by tunk » 2017/12/13 16:38:26

Just in case if someone runs into the same problem.

Scenario:
Moving a HP P800 RAID-controller from a Dell R710 running CentOS 5, to an IBM x3650M2 with CentOS 7.
Card is not seen by lspci, nor is there anything from dmesg. Googled and among other things I found
that I needed kmod-cciss. So it was installed as described by StormCloud previously in the thread:

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rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
rpm -Uvh http://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-7.0-3.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-cciss
Still no go. To cut a long story short, it turns out that the card is PCIe Gen1 whereas the server has Gen2.
Entering the bios to force the PCIe slot to use Gen1 solved the problem:
BIOS: system settings → devices and I/O-ports → PCIe Gen1/Gen2 speed selection, set P800 to Gen1.

doc_johnny
Posts: 1
Joined: 2018/02/19 14:43:57

Re: Possible use of driver for HP SmartArray P400(cciss)

Post by doc_johnny » 2018/02/19 15:30:57

CentOS didn't finde the hard disks on a E200i controller on a HP Proliant ML 350 G5..
The installation was possible after using the set of hpsa.hpsa_simple_mode=1 hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 kernel parameters (type TAB to se the kernel parameter line on installation an add the mentioned parameters). After installation the system would not boot. Therefore I used the solution of booting into the Rescue System, once again using the hpsa kernel parameters on startup.

After chroot into the installed system it was just adding the hpsa kernel parameters to the file /etc/syssconfig/grub
Thus I edited the following line

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet hpsa.hpsa_simple_mode=1 hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1"
Obviously afterwards you have to create the new GRUB configuration by excecuting:

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grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Before that I tried different other solutions, like installing the cciss rpm package, but it didn't work out. Actually on a former installation of openSuSE Leap 42.3 using the cciss kernel parameters worked flawlessly but for the CentOS 7 it worked well with the hpsa parameters.

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