Driver needed for Promise PDC42819 SATA/SAS controller

[Mark Nelson]

Hi Greg,

First, thanks for the reply!

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:16 AM, Greg KH <greg at kroah.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 01:04:23PM +1000, Mark Nelson wrote:
>> Hi Greg,
>>
>> I think I have an addition for the following list:
>> http://www.linuxdriverproject.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DriversNeeded
>>
>> I recently bought an MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard and it has a
>> Promise SATA/SAS RAID (fakeraid) controller onboard that is not
>> currently supported by the Linux kernel (as far as I can tell anyway).
>
> hardware raid is bad, stay away from it :)
>
> Seriously, if at all possible, it's just not worth it, use software
> raid, it's faster and more reliable (you can restore your disks if the
> controller breaks...)

Never fear - I wasn't actually planning on using the proprietary
fakeraid library (I have this silly rule about getting my data back in
the same form I saved it in :) ). I just really wanted to be able to
use the eSATA and internal SATA ports connected to the Promise
chip.

>
>> References to the controller in the motherboard manual and the
>> motherboard manufacturer's website: Promise T3 [1]
>>
>> Written on the actual chip on the motherboard: Promise PDC42819 [2]
>>
>> This chip is also used on Promise's own FastTrak TX2650 & TX4650
>> adapters [3] which have "partial open source" drivers [4], [5]. This
>> driver looks like an open source wrapper around a binary blob (some
>> fasttrak library for software fake raid, I think).
>>
>> Having a quick look through the source of Promise's driver, it looks
>> like the driver has been hacked up out of a driver that was originally
>> used for fakeraid on ATI and intel southbridges as well as Promise's
>> SX4 adapter (and some Promise adapter called the OCTOPUSII).
>>
>> Promise has an open source commitment written on its werbsite [6] but
>> it just relates to their SuperTrak products (not their FastTrak ones)
>> and the stex driver.
>
> Try bringing this up on the linux-ata mailing list, the developers there
> should be able to easily help you out.

Excellent. I'll do that. Thanks for the tip!

Thanks again!

Mark.