Is it possible to make a bootable RAID on AMD 700 series chipset?

[ThinkDifferently]

Specifically, I have a motherboard with the South Bridge AMD SB700 chipset for I/O and RAID support.  This RAID requires a driver to be loaded at boot time (from the "ok" prompt) before the OS loads to recognize the RAID.

I'm trying to install the FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE onto a RAID-1 (Mirror) using this chipset.

1) Is there a driver available in FreeBSD for this chipset (either natively or externally; if external, where)?
2) Once I make a mirror and install an OS onto it, can I make it bootable?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Note, I'm not a hacker, but nor am I a noob.

My motherboard is Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H.  I've already determined that FreeBSD does install and run well on it (and only the 7.1 release supports the 8111C onboard Ethernet LAN chipset).  However, I have no clue how to do motherboard-based RAID with a boot-time driver in FreeBSD.

My attempts at using a RocketRAID PCI card failed...something about it interfering with the onboard RAID chipset (even if it's disabled).  I cannot boot from the RocketRAID, but that was a different thread entirely.

My main focus with this thread is can I get a FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE bootable mirror on the SB700 chipset?  Unfortunately, I didn't find anything on the FreeBSD.Org site regarding SB700.

[Jia-Shiun Li]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 3:11 AM, ThinkDifferently <Jeremy@...> wrote:
> Specifically, I have a motherboard with the South Bridge AMD SB700 chipset
> for I/O and RAID support.  This RAID requires a driver to be loaded at boot
> time (from the "ok" prompt) before the OS loads to recognize the RAID.

ataraid(4) does not have any info about ATI chipsets, and nor does
dmraid of Linux. Supposingly ATI did not release info about software
RAID metadata format so there is little the community can do.

Since AMD released GPU info after acquiring ATI, maybe they need a
poke about chipsets?

JIa-Shiun.
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[ThinkDifferently]

Jia-Shiun Li wrote:

ataraid(4) does not have any info about ATI chipsets, and nor does
dmraid of Linux. Supposingly ATI did not release info about software
RAID metadata format so there is little the community can do.

Since AMD released GPU info after acquiring ATI, maybe they need a
poke about chipsets?

Indeed.

In my research and unwitting trials with this particular motherboard (Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H), I found that, while it is generally well tolerated by FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE, the onboard RAID is completely incompatible.  Even when a RocketRAID 3120 card was used, the RAID could be built, but the ar0 device thus created, did not survive a reboot.  Also, a software RAID was attempted -- after a minimal install from CD, the atacontrol command was used to create RAID ar0, then (without rebooting) exiting back to the installer, the OS was loaded onto it; however, upon reboot, ar0 could not be found.  In other words, it could not boot from any RAID, whether by software in FreeBSD or by hardware on RocketRAID.

The problem stems from the board's Southbridge SB700 chipset (the infamous 700 series).  This chipset is not (yet?) supported in FreeBSD.

Other notes on this board include the following:
-Generic VGA worked.
-The onboard LAN (chipset 8111C) worked in 7.1-RELEASE, but not 7.0.
-If the SATA ports are put into AHCI or Native IDE modes, individual disks were recognized, but in RAID mode, neither the RAID nor individual disks could be seen.