Re: Broadcom 3808 support

> On 6 Jan 2022, at 11:29, Gerrit Kuehn <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I already asked this on -stable, but got no reply so far, so I'll try
> again here:
> I was thinking about buying something like Supermicro's
> SSG-540P-E1CTR45L storage box which comes with a Broadcom 3808 chipset.
> The Broadcom docs claim this has FreeBSD support, and so does this
> thread of a few months ago:
> https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-scsi/2021-June/000004.html
> 
> However, I cannot find the mentioned support in the mpr driver when
> looking into the code of FreeBSD 13, and I am missing any pointer from
> which FreeBSD version on support might be available. I also don't
> understand at all what is meant by "inbox driver" vs. "out-of-box
> driver" from the post linked above.
> 
> Can anyone here shed a light on this for me? Is the Broadcom 3808 chip
> supported, and if so, from which version on?

Hi Gerrit,

Yes I asked same question a few months ago, Sreekanth from Broadcom kindly replied in the thread below that SAS3038 is supported through mpr driver.
https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-scsi/2021-May/000000.html
My reliability related question was left unanswered though.

I bought Broadcom 9500-8e/8i cards (SAS3808 based), and plugged them into Supermicro X12SPL-F motherboards.
There are other Supermicro motherboards with a built-in 3808 chipset, but not so found of this solution, I would be tempted to advice for Broadcom SAS cards directly, to be sure to properly manage firmware updates etc...

Anyway, tested with FreeBSD 13, what I can say is that it works out of the box.
In terms of performance, I was able to sustain a 30x260 MB/s read throughput, from my 30 test SAS drives (in a 36 bays chassis), connected to a single SAS3808 adapter.
Would not have been possible with PCI Express 3.0.

Not in production yet, so can't say much about long-term reliability for now...

Kind regards,

Ben