Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

commonmanthemes · 2014-06-27 20:27:32

Hello again Arch users,

I just recently rebuilt my home workstation. Previously I was using an LSI MegaRAID 9240-4i, which was great and automatically appeared as an sdX device without intervention.

Unfortunately, my new motherboard didn't like the card, so I had to switch.

As such, I've moved to an Areca 1214-4i. According to everything I've read, the kernel itself should support the card. Additionally, while Areca doesn't provide a package for the driver for Arch, they do have the generic Linux makefile available.

Booting from the latest Arch liveCD, fdisk -l gives me nothing.

And of course, nobody's built an AUR package yet.

Furthermore, when I install gcc and make via pacman and try to build the drivers package, I get an error message saying no Makefile is specified. Even using the -f switch and pointing to the very much there makefile produces the same result.

I am happy to provide whatever other information is requested to get this solved, but I am stumped for now to where I am running Windows. Please save my soul.

Last edited by commonmanthemes (2014-06-27 20:32:02)

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-10 18:07:45

Bump.

Buehler? Buehler?

alphaniner · 2014-07-10 19:10:13

An empty bump? How about adding some obviously relevant information such as lspci, journal, dmesg, etc.

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-22 01:44:26

My apologies Arch users... I wasn't taking the necessary time to solve this and had actually posted while at work and thusly not at my workstation. Time to revisit this - properly.

To alphaniner, the point of my post was to get a starting point. The only thing you mentioned I would've known to do was lspci and I figured that moot since I clearly don't have the kernel module.

Since then my friend (something of a phenom programmer) and I have done some in depth work on this. We found that the arcmsr module has been included in the Linux kernel for some time now, but an old 2010 version of it that doesn't support my card.

Smart as he was, he was also unable to figure out Areca's makefile for "all distributions" but did come to the conclusion that it is hosed. Boo to Areca on that.

Since then, I've managed to get CentOS 7 working easily, as the RPM from Areca works. But, of course, I want to be on Arch.

---lspci---

00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (external gfx0 port B) (rev 02)
00:00.2 IOMMU: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RD990 I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port B)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port C)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port H)
00:0a.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (external gfx1 port A)
00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 40)
00:12.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:12.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:13.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 SMBus Controller (rev 42)
00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA) (rev 40)
00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 LPC host controller (rev 40)
00:14.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SBx00 PCI to PCI Bridge (rev 40)
00:14.5 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI2 Controller
00:15.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB700/SB800/SB900 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 0)
00:15.1 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB700/SB800/SB900 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 1)
00:15.2 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB900 PCI to PCI bridge (PCIE port 2)
00:16.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB OHCI0 Controller
00:16.2 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 USB EHCI Controller
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h Processor Function 0
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h Processor Function 1
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h Processor Function 2
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h Processor Function 3
00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h Processor Function 4
00:18.5 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 15h Processor Function 5
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Hawaii PRO [Radeon R9 290]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device aac8
02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Areca Technology Corp. Device 1214 (rev b3)
03:00.0 USB controller: Etron Technology, Inc. EJ168 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 01)
04:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9172 SATA 6Gb/s Controller (rev 12)
05:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: VIA Technologies Inc. VT1720/24 [Envy24PT/HT] PCI Multi-Channel Audio Controller (rev 01)
05:0e.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0)
06:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
07:00.0 USB controller: Etron Technology, Inc. EJ168 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 01)
08:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9172 SATA 6Gb/s Controller (rev 12)

---lspci -v---

02:00.0 RAID bus controller: Areca Technology Corp. Device 1214 (rev b3)
Subsystem: Areca Technology Corp. Device 1214
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 77
Memory at fe940000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=128K]
Memory at fe900000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
Expansion ROM at fe960000 [disabled] [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: arcmsr

(Keep in mind this is on CentOS, so there is an applicable arcmsr module.)

Seems to me the easiest way to get this running would be to make the RPM into a usable Arch package, but I'm not sure where to start with that. At least not for this, where I can't get Arch running with the module to install to the RAID array. Otherwise, I would simply use rpmextract and have a go at that. This specific scenario seems to make this much more difficult but maybe I'm missing something.

I'm happy to provide any other information necessary here, so please just ask if you need it. Thank you.

Last edited by commonmanthemes (2014-07-22 01:50:13)

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-22 02:13:05

Okay, gave a go at using rpm extract and copying the /etc and /lib contents in. I'm able to successfully depmod -a the kernel module, but when I modprobe it, I get:

ERROR: could not insert 'arcmsr' : Exec format error

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-22 02:29:19

Alright I've been able to get the makefile to run and successfully depmod and modprobed it. However, lspci still reports no modules available for the card.

Now I'm really stumped.

alphaniner · 2014-07-22 14:21:27

I'm no expert, but I think the module from the RPM wouldn't load because it wasn't built for the same kernel.

WRT the compiled module, are you sure it actually got loaded? How did you make it? How did you modprobe it? What is the 'filename' when you run modinfo arcmsr?

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-23 00:12:09

Okay, making some kind of progress here - however small. I built a base/base-devel Arch rig on an SSD I had laying around so I could have the latest packages I'd be working with installing on the RAID array. Using what I learned last night (that you can build the module from the source if doing so in a directory on a /run/media drive, but not one at /mnt - no clue why but whatever), I ran the make on a 3.15.5-2-ARCH system and it compiles.

Output of modinfo before depmod:

filename: /lib/module/3.15.5-2-ARCH/.../arcmsr.ko.gz
version 1.20.0.0.15 2010/08/05

Clearly it's the old included-in-kernel version I talked about above. Then I "depmod -a arcmsr.ko" in the directory containing the freshly compiled module and it completes without error. Then I "modprobe arcmsr" and that completes too.

But then I run modinfo again and no change. Also, lspci -v shows no modules for the card still.

Hopefully that's useful to someone brighter than myself.

Last edited by commonmanthemes (2014-07-23 00:12:53)

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-23 00:24:19

WOOOO! I hacked it together enough to see the disk, but I'm going to post what I did to both help others and have someone correct me if I'm doing something especially stupid.

Or, if anyone has some caveats to make sure my RAID array works when I go to boot off of it.

Looking at the output of modinfo (thanks alphaniner!) I noticed the module it's looking for was a ko.gz,not .ko like the output of my compiling. So, I gzipped that .ko and overwrote it to where modinfo said the module was (so same filepath as the outdated driver). Then I modprobed again and lspci started showing it.

However, it did take a reboot to get the array to show under fdisk. Good thing I had the install on an SSD to work with because a liveCD wouldn't have been able to do that.

So now for the install! Again advice welcome as I'm certain this isn't going to work the first try.

alphaniner · 2014-07-23 02:19:15

OK, that's what I was looking for. Prior to my last post, I did basically the same things. Building the module was no problem, but couldn't load it until I overwrote the old one with it. I was making everything up as I went along so I didn't want to lead you astray.

In the end, I don't think it matters that the module is compressed, just that it's in the right location. And rather than overwrite the 'old' module, just build with 'make install'. That automatically installs the module to /lib/modules/<kernel version>/extra and also AFAICT updates module dependencies (ie. depmod). The new module will override the old one without overwriting it.

If you're actually going to boot from the RAID, you'll need to regenerate your initramfs if you're just migrating an existing installation. Also keep in mind you'll have to recompile the module with each kernel update.

Also 'depmod -a' probes all modules; I don't think specifying a particular module has any effect.

commonmanthemes · 2014-07-23 03:47:05

Fully up and running in MATE. Editing the modules section of mkinitcpio to include arcmsr and then regenerating the linux image did the final trick.

Thanks for your help alphaniner. You asked exactly the right questions to get me where I was going. Props.

Arch Linux

#1 2014-06-27 20:27:32

Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#2 2014-07-10 18:07:45

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#3 2014-07-10 19:10:13

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#4 2014-07-22 01:44:26

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#5 2014-07-22 02:13:05

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#6 2014-07-22 02:29:19

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#7 2014-07-22 14:21:27

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#8 2014-07-23 00:12:09

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#9 2014-07-23 00:24:19

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#10 2014-07-23 02:19:15

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

#11 2014-07-23 03:47:05

Re: Issues With Areca 1214 RAID

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