Feature #15896
open
Intel Rapid Storage Technology intel-rst raidon support
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Description
Hi,
My understanding is that some Intel SATA boards (like my Comet Lake intel system) "SATA controller: Intel Corporation Device " have support for hardware RAID, which in the BIOS is called RaidOn or "Rapid Storage Technology".
My system is a UEFI Dell Precision workstation and I set SATA operation to AHCI, but I wonder whether it would work with RAIDON enabled. I did not test so far. I can say that I have used OpenIndiana for a few years succesfully using AHCI setting on the Intel SATA device.
My understanding is that Intel created a driver for Linux called intel-rst and that this integrates with Linux RAID , which according to this 2011 paper from Intel supports Linux DM RAID and MD RAID
[[https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/rst-linux-paper.pdf]]
so according to that paper it theoretically integrates with mdadm command from Linux.
I have no practical experience with it and some Linux users advise not to use it, the support in Linux distributions may be incomplete...
Anyway for Windows the Intel RST driver is at version 18.7.6
Question or RFE (request for enhancement) is whether it works on Illumos ?
I did not try it and sort of by default assumed I had to set SATA operation to AHCI, but maybe it is worth a try ... but I guess this would require an Intel IRST RAID driver in the Illumos kernel , is there any ??
Related issues
Updated by David Stes 13 days ago
- Related to Feature #15897: mirror ESP (EFI) partition on boot disk added
Updated by Jean-Pierre André 12 days ago
David Stes wrote:
Hi,
[...]
Question or RFE (request for enhancement) is whether it works on Illumos ?
I did not try it and sort of by default assumed I had to set SATA operation to AHCI, but maybe it is worth a try ... but I guess this would require an Intel IRST RAID driver in the Illumos kernel , is there any ??
I have tried to make use of it in RAID mode on a Dell Precision server years ago to no avail, and I simply switched to Linux whose mdraid is compatible with Windows and dual bootable.
Updated by David Stes 11 days ago
Thanks for the update, if I get a chance I'll try to see what exactly happens when installing into a RaidOn Intel SATA setup although it seems logical to use the AHCI setup (which I took for granted anyway). The most logical thing to do with Illumos is to use software ZFS mirror of boot disk, I suppose. And that works. Installation onto some forms of hardware RAID (like Intel Rapid Storage) could have some benefits. In any case this is not a criticism of Illumos, on the contrary I have the impression that Illumos works better on Dell Precision than some Linux distributions ...