I have an IBM v5030 Storewize that had 2 bad SATA M.2 drives in the controllers. The IBM software was garbage at best and buggy as hell when it did work. Fast forward to today and I was able to install TrueNAS Scale and updated it to Fangtooth 25.04.2.4 . Currently I only have one of the control nodes loaded and booted in the unit. Once I can get at least a single node to see the drives then I’ll make the attempt to get both nodes online looking at the drives in a “shared” configuration.
However I have a large problem… No drives other than the boot drive show up…
Obviously I would like to be able to utilize all the drives. Problem is I can’t figure out how I can install the drivers into TrueNAS for it to pick it up correctly or even test it since apt is disabled and was wondering if the nice devs would be willing to take a look at including the PM8073 chipset among the list of supported devices please. Also here is an lspci, lsscsi, and lsblk dump.
Let me know if you need any other logs / info dumps.
admin@truenas[~]$ lsscsi
[0:0:0:0] disk ATA SVM2SH6D120GLM22 41 /dev/sda [6:0:0:0] enclosu AHCI SGPIO Enclosure 2.00 -
admin@truenas[~]$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS sda 8:0 0 111.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1M 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 512M 0 part
├─sda3 8:3 0 95.3G 0 part
└─sda4 8:4 0 16G 0 part
admin@truenas[~]$ lspci |grep -i sas
05:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: PMC-Sierra Inc. PM8073 Tachyon SPCve 12G 16-port SAS/SATA controller (rev 06)
One way forward, is to test and see if current Debian Linux supports your PMC-Sierra Inc. PM8073 Tachyon device. If not, then it is much less likely that iX will support it in the future.
If current Debian does support your SAS controller, you can make a feature request in the special Category for that purpose. Don’t forget to both vote for your own feature, and advocate for the feature. Like posting a link here, in this forum thread, to the feature request post thread.
In the mean time, you can look at enabling dev-tools and seeing about getting the driver with it’s userland tools installed. That will make this instance of TrueNAS unsupportable unless the problem can be repeated without the changes. But, if the device has a Debian package, then you can immediately see if it will work for your use.
Remember, TrueNAS and ZFS don’t like or want hardware RAID. Not even JBOD or simple Concats. It appears that the PM8073 is not RAID, but I don’t know for certain. Many hardware RAID disk controllers do elevator seeks and writes, even when the host OS requests not to do so. Or does write caching without flushing when requested. Those 2 items are known to potentially cause ZFS pool corruption when un-expected power offs or OS crashes occur.
Last, dual controller that is not iX supported hardware, is not supported. Meaning, you are 100% on your own if you try redundant controllers. Further, ZFS is NOT multiple mount, which if that occurs on a pool, will lead to pool corruption with data loss. Possibly un-repairable corruption.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the controller has no drivers.
admin@truenas[~]$ lspci |grep -i sas
05:00.0 Serial Attached SCSI controller: PMC-Sierra Inc. PM8073 Tachyon SPCve 12G 16-port SAS/SATA controller (rev 06)
Try lspci -k | grep -A3 PM8073 to grab the next 3 lines and see if it’s picking up any driver.
You can enable apt with install-dev-tools but this will revert on upgrades as well as making it very easy to break your system with the wrong command. (Don’t apt upgrade for example.)
So the good news is, it looks like it is picking up a driver after trying your trick. Bad news is the the controller is wanting to be configured for the Raid Array. Sooo, my next hat trick with it is trying to figure out how I can hookup a full Video, keyboard and mouse to the SAN Node that has no video card or functional USB. I’m waiting on receiving a part in that I think will allow me to do it but this is going to be some next level shenanigans.
Currently the idea (way out of left field) is using a Crypto miner PCIe 4 way splitter to connect a Video card, and to hook up a PCI USB expansion card. Because anytime I plug in a USB drive or keyboard it doesn’t show up in the system. So I think the USBs are tied to its version of a IPMI / ILO.
Then to power it all with an external ATX Powersupply. Will this work? shrugs dunno but its worth a shot to see if I can get an actual boot display and maybe catch a CTRL+C or something to see if I can get into the controllers configuration. Because at the moment I’m come up with zero information on a helper utility to configure the controller from within a Linux or any OS basically.
For now I wait on the FedEx or UPS person to delivery my parts…
But if this all works I’m going to have a heck of a story / tutorial on how to install TrueNAS Scale on an IBM v5030 Storewize SAN.
