Switching from Intel HEDT to AMD HEDT, to be more precise from Intel i9-7900X to Threadripper 3960X was enjoyable experience. More then double the core count, very attractive pricing (relatively) and support for more recent technologies. Code compile is just flying …
Unfortunately not all aspects of new platform are smooth sailing and main problem is with driver side on Linux. Using RAID on Linux is practically impossible due to … lack of driver.
After setting up two SSD into RAID and Windows install, including drivers that are available on AMD download page, OS did detected all drives, including ones running in RAID correctly.
As usually I did installed Debian as second OS for dual boot. And here is where the problems started. RAID was not detected. So, as in Windows case, did visited AMD download page to find out, that there is no Linux driver.
Did contacted AMD support to receive info that Linux is … not supported. AMD HEDT platform don’t support Linux ?
After one, maybe one and a half, year from My purchase Lenovo started offering theirs workstations that are equipped with Threadripper PRO CPUs (with will be available for DIY market in near feature – as of writing). Seeing that those workstations support Linux I was curious if they offer RAID driver for download … and they do. Threadripper and Threadripper PRO are essentially same products the only difference is with max PCIE Lanes supported (88 vs 128),memory channels (4 vs 8) and memory capacity (256GB vs 2TB).
So what I did:
- To get drives head to Lenovo product page for P620 workstation.
- On download page change to “Manual Download”
- Select “RAID/SAS HBA Controllers, Backplanes, Storage Expanders/Switches, Bootable Storage”
- Select operating system “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (64-bit)”
- download latest driver
The one that I did downloaded is: AMD RAID Driver | 9.3.0.235 | 13 May | 2021 | 5.82 MB, file name: “l5rad06us14wsusi_p620.zip”.
This archive contains “driver_sdk” folder with contains source code for RAID driver that can be compiled for current kernel. Other packages offers prebuild drivers.
Installation on Debian 10 Buster went smoothly (with kernel 4.X), driver did installed after compilation and RAID was detected (fallow README and cp manually driver and blacklist ahci).
Detailed steps:
- compile rcraid by:
bash install
- remove ahci mod and insert rcraid:
sudo rmmod ahci
- and insert the freshly built AMD-RAID kernel module by entering
sudo modprobe rcraid
- blacklist ahci driver so it’s not loaded upon rebootin /etc/default/grub add:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet modprobe.blacklist=ahci”
More details: https://www.kwikr.de/Howto_Windows_Ubuntu_AMD-RAID.html#sec-1-6-1
Unfortunately there is few issues with that driver:
- kernel 5.10, from backports, causes driver compilation issue
- ahci driver has to be blacklisted
Because of blacklisting ahci driver 2 of my drives are no longer accessible. This will depend on motherboard and additional controller. For example on my Zenith II Extreme (non alpha) supports:
AMD TRX40 chipset : 4 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s) Support Raid 0, 1, 10
ASMedia® SATA 6Gb/s controller : 4 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s)
and all drives connected to that ASMedia controller are no longer accessible as AMD RCRAID appears to not support anything else. All NVME drives are visible so that’s a plus.
Didn’t used RAID for bootable media and seeing trouble that it causes I doubt that I will ever go that route.
Summary:
As an customer I’m disappointed that I had to wait over one year to get support for RAID on AMD HEDT platform. What is worse support and driver were probably available on day one (older platform did supported Linux and RAID drivers were available, unfortunately those drives didn’t worked on Linux for sTRX4) and after (as of writing year and a half) in product lifetime sTRX4 owners still don’t have access to official driver from AMD …