ARCMSR(4)

📦 version 12.2, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ ARCMSR(4) ✨

okay bestie, gather round, because we're about to talk about arcmsr — the Areca RAID Controller driver 💖 and yes it's a kernel interfaces manual page, so it's giving very serious ✨system-level✨ energy, but we're gonna make it cute.

🎀 NAME 🎀

arcmsr — Areca RAID Controller driver

like. that's the whole vibe. it drives Areca RAID controllers. she's an icon, she's a driver, she said what she said 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

bestie, there are two (2) ways to get this girl into your life, and honestly? pick your fighter.

Option A: compile her straight into the kernel 🧚 — drop these lines into your kernel configuration file:

device pci
device scbus
device da
device arcmsr

Option B: load her as a module at boot time 🦋 — put this line in loader.conf(5):

arcmsr_load="YES"

no cap, that's it. that's the whole thing. periodt.

💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

so the arcmsr driver provides support for the Areca ARC-11xx, ARC-12xx, ARC-13xx, ARC-16xx and ARC-18xx series of SAS and SATA RAID controllers. yes, all five families, she's versatile like that 🔥

these controllers feature RAID-0, 1, 3, 5, 6, and 10 and JBOD acceleration for up to 16 SATA drives. sixteen!! the way that she can hold sixteen drives… main character energy fr fr 👑

and it's not just the basics, bestie — she also supports:

  • RAID level and stripe level migration
  • online capacity expansion
  • hot insertion/removal
  • automatic failover and rebuild
  • SMART

access to the arrays comes to you via the SCSI CAM /dev/da? device nodes 🫶 and there's also a management interface hanging out at the /dev/arcmsr? device node ✨

oh and btw — management tools for i386 and amd64 are available from Areca. iykyk.

🌈 HARDWARE 🌈

the arcmsr driver supports the following cards, and bestie she did NOT come to play — look at this list, it's literally a whole squad:

  • ARC-1110
  • ARC-1120
  • ARC-1130
  • ARC-1160
  • ARC-1170
  • ARC-1110ML
  • ARC-1120ML
  • ARC-1130ML
  • ARC-1160ML
  • ARC-1200
  • ARC-1201
  • ARC-1203
  • ARC-1210
  • ARC-1212
  • ARC-1213
  • ARC-1214
  • ARC-1216
  • ARC-1220
  • ARC-1222
  • ARC-1223
  • ARC-1224
  • ARC-1226
  • ARC-1230
  • ARC-1231
  • ARC-1260
  • ARC-1261
  • ARC-1270
  • ARC-1280
  • ARC-1210ML
  • ARC-1220ML
  • ARC-1231ML
  • ARC-1261ML
  • ARC-1280ML
  • ARC-1380
  • ARC-1381
  • ARC-1680
  • ARC-1681
  • ARC-1880
  • ARC-1882
  • ARC-1883
  • ARC-1884

forty-two cards. FORTY-TWO. ate and left no crumbs 💅🍓

🦋 FILES 🦋

here's where she lives, bestie:

  • /dev/da? — array block device
  • /dev/arcmsr? — management interface

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

go read these next, they're the friends of the family:

🕰️ HISTORY 🕰️

the arcmsr driver first appeared in FreeBSD 5.4. a legend from day one, honestly 🌸

👑 AUTHORS 👑

the driver was written by Erich Chen <erich@areca.com.tw>. thank you Erich, you understood the assignment 🫶✨

💀 BUGS 💀

okay so here's the tea, and we're keeping it real:

the driver has been tested on i386 and amd64. it likely requires additional work to function on big-endian architectures.

no cap, that last part matters — if you're on a big-endian machine, this is giving unfinished business, so don't be surprised if things get weird 😭

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 💖 this was pulled from the Debian edition of the page, dated November 8, 2017 — so shoutout to that version and that date, they brought us here 🎀🌈 mwah, go configure your RAID array, you've got this ✨

📦 where this page comes from