NAME

hpsahba - tool to enable/disable HBA mode on some HP Smart Array controllers.

SYNOPSIS

• hpsahba -h
• hpsahba -v
• hpsahba -i /dev/sgN
• hpsahba -E /dev/sgN
• hpsahba -d /dev/sgN

DESCRIPTION

CAUTION: This tool will destroy your data and may damage your hardware!

hpsahba is able to enable or disable HBA mode on some HP Smart Array controllers on which regular tools, like 'ssacli', reports HBA mode as not supported.

When enabling or disabling HBA mode, RAID controller changes its internal configuration immediately, without requiring reboot. Any existing data may be lost after changing the HBA mode, so be extremely careful.

Some servers may not be able to boot from disks attached to controller in HBA mode. Move the /boot partition and the bootloader out of disks attached to controller onto USB flash driver or SD card to circumvent this limitation.

When HBA mode is enabled, controller usually prints some diagnostic message during boot, like "Hardware RAID support is disabled via controller NVRAM configuration settings" (example from P410i). Attempts to configure RAID arrays in this mode are expected to fail.

Options

• hpsahba -h

  Show help message and exit.

• hpsahba -v

  Show version and exit.

• hpsahba -i DEVICE_PATH

  Show some information about device. This Includes HBA mode support bit (supported/not supported) and current state of HBA mode (enabled/disabled). It is recommended to run this before trying to enable or disable HBA mode.

• hpsahba -E DEVICE_PATH

  Enable HBA mode.

• hpsahba -d DEVICE_PATH

  Disable HBA mode.

Kernel driver support

hpsahba itself is able to work on any modern Linux system.

However, to get system actually see and use disks in HBA mode, few kernel patches required: https://github.com/im-0/hpsahba/tree/master/kernel.

This functionality is disabled by default. To enable, load module hpsa with parameter hpsa_use_nvram_hba_flag set to "1". Or set it in the kernel command line: "hpsa.hpsa_use_nvram_hba_flag=1".

Patchset changelog:

• V1 -> V2:
  • Device visibility change properly detected if device is both updated and masked/unmasked in the same time.

This will never be upstreamed and officially supported (for P410), see the email from Don Brace: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/17/618. So use at your own risk.

You can use DKMS package in https://github.com/im-0/hpsahba/tree/master/contrib/dkms to patch hpsa driver in a compiled kernel.

Supported hardware

Tested on following hardware so far:

• HP Smart Array P410i (PCI ID: 103c:3245, board ID: 0x3245103c, firmware: 6.64)
• HP Smart Array P812 (PCI ID: 103c:3249, board ID: 0x3249103c, firmware: 6.64)
• Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers / P410 (PCI ID: 103c:323a, board ID: 0x3243103c, firmware: 6.64)
• Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array G6 controllers / P212 (PCI ID: 103c:323a, board ID: 0x3241103c, firmware: 6.64)

(open an issue or a pull request if you successfully used this tool on other controllers)

Additional links

• https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_0b76aec489764aea9802a6d27b

  Archive containing saupdate.efi - EFI binary for ia64 architecture which implements the same functionality for P410i. Seems not usable anywhere except of old HP Integrity servers.

BUGS

See issues on GitHub: https://github.com/im-0/hpsahba/issues.

AUTHOR

hpsahba was written by Ivan Mironov <mironov.ivan@gmail.com>