HighPoint HPT374 RAID drivers
 

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone is familiar with the current situation regarding drivers etc for the HPT374.

I have an IT7, which has an onboard HPT374. Using the driver source from HighPoint's site, I compiled a kernel module. The module successfully loads, and I can use my RAID 0/1 array (comprised of four 200GB drives):

Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: Device Driver for HPT374 UDMA/ATA133 RAID Controller
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: Version 1.11, Compiled Jun 27 2003 11:40:08
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: Found Controller: HPT374 UDMA/ATA133 RAID Controller
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: scsi0 : hpt374
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: Vendor: HPT Inc. Model: HPT374 RAID01 Rev: 1.05
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: SCSI device sda: 781443841 512-byte hdwr sectors (400099 MB)
Jul 9 15:58:07 ben082-0 kernel: sda: sda1

However, there are a few outstanding issues:

o Clearly the chip's BIOS is older because it doesn't support RAID1/0, which I would prefer to use
o Benchmarking the array using bonnie++ shows that its performace for both reads and writes is approximately the same as read and write performance on a single IBM 60GXP 60GB disk

So here are my questions:

1. What is the most recent stable kernel which will work correctly with my HPT374, and which HPT374 BIOS version should I install to work with this kernel?

2. Is there any way to upgrade the HPT374 BIOS from Linux? Is upgrading the BIOS going to be different because it's an onboard chip and not a PCI card? (Note: this array will never be used as a boot device)

3. What kind of performance should I realistically expect from the array? The array consists of four WD 200GB/8MB ATA100 disks.

Thanks for any advice =)

An additional question:

When I insert the hpt374 module, the system load goes to 1.00. When I check ps ajx, I see that the [hpt_wt] process is in state DW ("uninterruptable sleep, usually I/O"). Surely this can't be a good thing?

I thought that those were 'dumb' RAID cards. By that I mean a BIOS-assisted boot of a sw array. That may explain why your i/o is about the same. I thought that those cards only worked as an addition IDE controller - RAID mode not supported(?) I may be thinking of BSD, tho.

Is there such a thing as win-raid...? :)

Edit - from OpenBSD.org

HighPoint HPT366, HPT370, HPT372, HPT374 (RAID mode is not supported)

Then again, there's a lot openbsd doesn't support...

And this from redhat:

ATA-100 (no RAID) -- Highpoint 370
ATA RAID -- 3ware Escalade 3W -- 5xxx/6xxx/7xxx, Adaptec 2400A

I know you rolled your own driver - might you have to remove the old one?

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

Like I stated, the chip does support RAID; it does have its own BIOS and supports booting from the RAID array, something that has been made to work in linux. I'm not interested in booting from it though.

Right now I have it configured, and functioning correctly, as a RAID 0/1 array. There are four 200GB drives which combine for a total of 400GB of storage. There are three problems with this that I am aware of:

1) When I load the driver module, it raises the system load by 1.00 due to a DW state procress
2) There is no support in my current hpt374 bios version for RAID 1/0
3) The performance of the array is no faster than just a single disk.

and

Seem contradictory statements.

Some RAID cards - ones with bios and bootable - are really only bios-assisted boot of a software raid. adaptec 1200a for example. The adaptec 2400a has a slot for ram (no ram on the controller usually means sw RAID, btw) and an XOR processer onboard. The former costs $50, the latter $300.

Another quote from the BSD site (I know not your OS, but I believe applicable)
"
Non-Options

An often asked question on the mail lists is "Is the Promise or HighPoint IDE RAID controller supported?". The answer is "No". These cards and chips are not true hardware RAID controllers, but rather BIOS-assisted boot of a software RAID. As OpenBSD already supports software RAID in a hardware-independent way, there isn't much desire among the OpenBSD developers to implement special support for these cards.
"
quopted from : http://openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#RAID

RAID 1/0 and RAID 0/1 are different =)

Newer versions of the bios for this chip support RAID 1/0, but older versions do not. I haven't upgraded the BIOS because I've heard that the BIOS major version needs to be the same as the driver major version.

So ... any more info out there about this chip onboard the ever-popular Abit IT7?

I'm having some difficulties on getting HPT374 to work with my Slackware 9.0 distro. I'm just interrested in getting my array to work (I have created one with bios-config (ctrl+h), striping over two 120gb drives, 240gb totally).

How did you get your driver to show your array instead of showing you all the drives seperately?

Installing open source driver
 

Hi,

I used the "open source" version of the driver from HighPoint's website:

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/hpt374...ource-v111.tgz

I followed the directions and ended up with a kernel module. When I insert the module, I get a SCSI device that represents the array (/dev/sda). The array setup is controlled by the HPT374 BIOS, which you can access during the boot sequence.

Once you have /dev/sda, you can run fdisk on it like a normal disk.

Hope this helps,

Joseph

In the kernel you have to make sure all highpoint controller is a module. Highpoint's documentation states this. You must have messed it or you did not read the documentation.

HPT370 can be turned into raid. It just needs BIOS upgrade. Though, this can be tricky.


Flashing the BIOS needs DOS. You can use freedos or MS-DOS. Go to your motherboard manufacture and find out if you can upgrade your highpoint controller software. You may need to google.

For continous transfer, you will probably get around 100 to 133 megabytes per second although you just max out the PCI bus. For random transfer, you will get maybe 40 to 60 megabytes per second. The 8 megabytes of cache should help in huge data files like video, sound, graphics and database. To optimize your RAID setup, you have to play around with block sizes for both the array and the filesystem.

Re: Installing open source driver
 

Hi and thanks for replying!
I've narrowed down the problem. It seems like the arrays I'm creating within the BIOS-Setup (CTRL+H) doesn't work, and is not reported to the OS as arrays. I got their drivers running, and run "hptsvr" that came with SuSE-drivers (Since they haven't released the program as OpenSource). Now I checked out my arrays with the Windows-management software, and it reported that no arrays existed. I created a new array and rebooted the machine. Now /dev/sda was the size of the array, so apparently it worked.

Regarding the high load (~1.0 all the time) with SCSI-driver, I switched to IDE-drivers that came with 2.4.21-kernel, and they are working just fine (Using hpt366.o, hptraid.o and ataraid.o).

This is what my filesystems looks like now:

ph0x@gateway:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 9.0G 1.3G 7.2G 15% /
/dev/ataraid/d0p1 220G 119G 90G 57% /raid/array1
/dev/ataraid/d1p1 150G 20k 142G 1% /raid/array2

ataraid creates drives in /dev/ataraid/d*, and when you partition the drives you get /dev/ataraid/dXpY, where X is the array and Y is the partition number.

As you can se, the ide-driver doesn't suffer from any particular high load:

ph0x@gateway:~$ uptime
11:19:26 up 9:20, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

If it wasn't for the high load, I'd be using the SCSI-driver. I'm going to report this issue to HighPoint and hope they can give me an answer or fix the problem.

Sincerly,
Andreas aka. ph0x

Hi again all.

I'd just like to point out that I got a reply from HighPoint Support regarding my email, and I got a new set of drivers (Dated 2003-07-18), and they work just fine.

hpt374-opensource-v2.01-0718.tgz is the name of the packade, unfortunatly I cannot attach files, so I have to check if I can put it on the web somewhere.

As you can see, the driver isn't sucking up all CPU anymore:

root 4324 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 15:02 0:00 [hpt_wt]
root 4325 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? SW 15:02 0:00 [scsi_eh_0]
root 4348 0.0 0.3 8456 840 ? S 15:28 0:00 ./hptsvr
root 4349 0.0 0.3 8456 840 ? S 15:28 0:00 ./hptsvr
root 4350 0.0 0.3 8456 840 ? S 15:28 0:00 ./hptsvr
root 4351 0.0 0.3 8456 840 ? S 15:28 0:00 ./hptsvr
root 4352 0.0 0.3 8456 840 ? S 15:28 0:00 ./hptsvr

Plus, their GUI-daemon works with this driver, so I can now configure arrays from my workstation using their Win32-app.

Plus, the load doesn't get up to 1.00 1.00 1.00 anymore, so it seems they've fixed that bug.

/Andreas

New drivers?
 

Hi,

Where do we get these new drivers? Sounds like exactly what we need.

highpoint v2.01 driver
 

Andreas,

I'll happily put it online if you will email it to me. I don't think it is
available on highpoint's website yet.

Nick.

Re: highpoint v2.01 driver
 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by elronxenu

Forgot to include my email address ... nick@nick-andrew.net

I have a question into Highpoint tech support at the moment
re this version, but no reply yet. The loadavg of 1.00 on my
box seems to kill video playback with mplayer, and probably
also video capture.