You’d probably be the first person to hook up an optical drive to a SAS HBA!
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SAS card for G5Quad
- Thread starter Tratkazir_the_1st
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well thats what I was saying!
his fully working card, shows an OpenFirmware defined name and type in System profiler (LSI1064E LSILogic,sas scsi-2 are all from the OpenFirmware device tree entries)
but if we look at your system profiler entry, it just shows a generic PCI ID listing, which tells me that there is no Option ROM being loaded and no specfic entries are being put into the device tree, so of course its not going to be bootable
it shows/works in OS X because there are drivers for it, like how an AHCI card works, but it wont be bootable until its Option ROM is loading properly at a firmware level
you mention this is another card in my last question on this
but post 46 is what I was referring to there LOL
Yes! ...but post #46 was before i flashed this OF-"bios"-file i have. It even only shows the firmware-revision under the SAS-tab.
After flashing the bios/ROM i also got the "Fcode 1.00.49" like in the pic of his first post:
Sadly i did not check/post the "PCI Cards"-tab of this stage. And, without having some really new things to try, i am to lazy to rip the Quad open again. If i should assume a thing, it would be the fCode-ROM, i have flashed, is just enough to recognize some fCode beeing present, but not enough to get things to work. Like often with some "partially working" GPU-ROMs of "these days".
Edit: Problem is, that the ROM i flashed, clearly is not of this exact card. So, even flashing fine without any errors, it doesn't seem to really match. But it was the only one claiming "fCode" i was able to find at all. So i'm nearly 100% sure, @Tratkazir_the_1st 's card has something different on it. But before we see a dump, we will not know.
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I would still want to see a PCI listing and ideally a listing of how it shows up in the device tree (with a HDD plugged in)
did you reset PRAM and all that when you flashed the fCode ROM to the card? (your DeviceIDs look the same so thats a good start likely the same or very similar chipset)
as for if an optical drive would, that depends on if the SAS Card supports the ATAPI protocol which is its own thing added on from the ATA protocol
Pitty i didn't save this.
Yes, this i do after all major changes of important components.
Yes, i'm quite sure in having the exact same card. Maybe even the same chip revision. But maybe he can have a closer look at his.
Tht's what makes me so optimistic, that with his bios/ROM-file, it will just work
Might be a point and i doubt, that it will work. With the Delock SIL 3132 card, flashed with the Seritek 2SE2 firmware, the optical drive had very rudimentary functionality. Did not boot. And even the eject key on the keyboard did not work (which does with an AHCI-card). But it could read disks. Card was seen as Parallel SCSI.
I'll try it.
I really in big doubts about this, AFAIK SCSI cards could do such tricks but not SAS. M.b. HBA (Non-RAID) can but not tested such possibility at least with powermac.
Great!
If you boot DOS from a floppy and plan to dump to this too, remember the resulting ROM will need about 300k of disk space.
There are SCSI optical drives so being able to boot from them is a must. But there are no SAS optical drives AFAICS. HDDs, SSDs and tape drives, yeah, but opticals?
For what it's worth, I was able to get my SATA SSD to link up at 3Gbps (SATA II speeds) connected to the LSI SAS3041E.
This is in a late 2005 2.3Ghz DC G5. Running the same QuickBench tests, I get a peak of about 261MB/sec. The trick is to use lsiutil to configure the minimum link speed to 3.0Gbps. The default min is 1.5Gbps. Seems the controller doesn't want to negotiate a higher link rate with SATA drives. The firmware on my card is 1.26.0.0, with Fcode 1.00.49.On Github, I found the Linux lsiutil source and was able to compile the utility on my G5 running Void Linux.
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That’s really cool! Is your card bootable?For what it's worth, I was able to get my SATA SSD to link up at 3Gbps (SATA II speeds) connected to the LSI SAS3041E.
I expect it should be. I do see drives connected to it appear when I hold down the option key at power up. I tried booting a 10.4 Tiger (non-server) disk directly connected to it (the one I used for the benchmark test) and it started to go, but I think the lack of driver support caused it to stop pretty quickly. I'll have to connect up my Leopard install (or Tiger Server) to it to see if that is directly bootable.
Just confirmed that yes, indeed, it is bootable. It was able to boot my install of 10.4 Server with no issues.
Wow, great find.For what it's worth, I was able to get my SATA SSD to link up at 3Gbps (SATA II speeds) connected to the LSI SAS3041E.
Also, if you state it confirmed bootable, would you mind to dump the fCode bios?
As mentioned earlier in the thread, i have some bios flashed to my card too, which shows up in System Profiler. But it's from some slightly different card, so booting does not work. Would be great to have the right bios file, but i was just not able to find it online.
Is this "lsiutil" what pops up when booting to dos with the card installed? Never noticed there coul be any settings made. Is this commandline and are the settings made persistend /written to the bios?
Just checked the manual of the flasher SASFlash and was not able to find any options to set the link speed while flashing.
Yes, this is the utility and the Github repo. I took a few screenshots during the process. I can add them when I get home tonight.
Thanks, but hmmm i'm not using Linux. So is there such thing working with DOS or Windows too?
Threw together some steps in the attached PDF. Hope this helps.
Attached are the firmware and bios from the card (1064E, B3).
Thanks alot for posting!
Bios looks completely different to what i have fiashed. So strange that it even flashed at all, but not so much of a miracle, it did not boot.
Also firmware has differences while looking a bit more similar. So i will flash both an d look what the result will be. And, if this lsiutil works too, this might finally turn into a useful purchase after all! 😊
Thanks, but how can this work in Mac OS when the settings are done in another machine (i. e. a PC running DOS in my case)? Are these settings written to the card/into the bios somehow?
If this is the case shouldn't flashing with a dump of a card these settings had been made to be sufficient?
Or, if performed with the linux utility in the same machine, is it written to Open Firmware?
The settings on the card are stored in non-volatile memory (separate from the firmware and BIOS). You can configure the card in one machine and take it out and put it into another and the setting will not be lost.
That card is an interesting beast.
What is the difference between the firmware and the bios?