MPTUTIL(8)

📦 version 15.1, in freebsd 14.5, freebsd 15.1

💅 MPTUTIL(8) — bestie edition 💅

Okay so you're here for mptutil, the utility for managing LSI Fusion-MPT controllers. This is the System Manager's Manual page for mptutil(8), and I'm gonna walk you through it like we're texting. No cap, every single flag and detail is here. 🫶

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mptutil version
mptutil [-u unit] show adapter
mptutil [-u unit] show config
mptutil [-u unit] show drives
mptutil [-u unit] show events
mptutil [-u unit] show volumes
mptutil [-u unit] fail drive
mptutil [-u unit] online drive
mptutil [-u unit] offline drive
mptutil [-u unit] name volume name
mptutil [-u unit] volume status volume
mptutil [-u unit] volume cache volume enable|enabled|disable|disabled
mptutil [-u unit] clear
mptutil [-u unit] create type [-q] [-v] [-s stripe_size]
        drive[,drive[,...]]
mptutil [-u unit] delete volume
mptutil [-u unit] add drive [volume]
mptutil [-u unit] remove drive

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So the mptutil utility? It's the tool you use to display or modify various parameters on LSI Fusion-MPT controllers. Every time you run mptutil, it's like: zero or more global options, then a command. Commands can also have their own optional or required arguments after them. Periodt. 💅

Currently one global option is supported:

  • -u unit — tells it which controller unit to work with. If you don't specify a unit, then unit 0 is used. Default queen behavior. 👑

Volumes may be specified in two forms. First, a volume may be identified by its location as [xx:]yy where xx is the bus ID and yy is the target ID. If the bus ID is omitted, the volume is assumed to be on bus 0. Second, a volume may be specified by the corresponding daX device, such as da0. Slay. ✨

The mpt(4) controller divides drives up into two categories. Configured drives belong to a RAID volume either as a member drive or as a hot spare. Each configured drive is assigned a unique device ID such as 0 or 1 that is shown in show config, and in the first column of show drives. Any drive not associated with a RAID volume as either a member or a hot spare is a standalone drive. Standalone drives are visible to the operating system as SCSI disk devices. As a result, drives may be specified in three forms:

  1. A configured drive may be identified by its device ID.
  2. Any drive may be identified by its location as xx:yy where xx is the bus ID and yy is the target ID for each drive as displayed in show drives. Note that unlike volumes, a drive location always requires the bus ID to avoid confusion with device IDs.
  3. A standalone drive that is not part of a volume may be identified by its corresponding daX device as displayed in show drives.

The mptutil utility supports several different groups of commands. The first group of commands provides information about the controller, the volumes it manages, and the drives it controls. The second group is used to manage the physical drives attached to the controller. The third group is used to manage the logical volumes managed by the controller. The fourth group is used to manage the drive configuration for the controller. Iconic. 🌈

The informational commands include: 💖

  • version — Displays the version of mptutil.
  • show adapter — Displays information about the RAID controller such as the model number.
  • show config — Displays the volume and drive configuration for the controller. Each volume is listed along with the physical drives that the volume spans. If any hot spare drives are configured, then they are listed as well.
  • show drives — Lists all of the physical drives attached to the controller.
  • show events — Display all the entries from the controller's event log. Due to lack of documentation this command is not very useful currently and just dumps each log entry in hex. (Not me reading hex and pretending to understand 😭)
  • show volumes — Lists all of the logical volumes managed by the controller.

The physical drive management commands include: 🔥

  • fail drive — Mark drive as “failed requested”. Note that this state is different from the “failed” state that is used when the firmware fails a drive. Drive must be a configured drive.
  • online drive — Mark drive as an online drive. Drive must be part a configured drive in either the “offline” or “failed requested” states.
  • offline drive — Mark drive as offline. Drive must be a configured, online drive.

The logical volume management commands include: 🎀

  • name volume name — Sets the name of volume to name.
  • volume cache volume enable|enabled|disable|disabled — Enables or disables the drive write cache for the member drives of volume.
  • volume status volume — Display more detailed status about a single volume including the current progress of a rebuild operation if one is being performed.

The configuration commands include: 🧚

  • clear — Delete the entire configuration including all volumes and spares. All drives will become standalone drives. (Aka the nuclear option 💀)
  • create type [-q] [-v] [-s stripe_size] drive[,drive[,...]] — Create a new volume. The type specifies the type of volume to create. Currently supported types include:
    • raid0 — Creates one RAID0 volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
    • raid1 — Creates one RAID1 volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
    • raid1e — Creates one RAID1E volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
Note: Not all volume types are supported by all controllers.

If the -q flag is specified after type, then a “quick” initialization of the volume will be done. This is useful when the drives do not contain any existing data that need to be preserved.

If the -v flag is specified after type, then more verbose output will be enabled. Currently this just provides notification as drives are added to volumes when building the configuration.

The -s stripe_size parameter allows the stripe size of the array to be set. By default a stripe size of 64K is used. The list of valid values for a given type are listed in the output of show adapter.

  • delete volume — Delete the volume volume. Member drives will become standalone drives.
  • add drive [volume] — Mark drive as a hot spare. Drive must not be a member of a volume. If volume is specified, then the hot spare will be dedicated to that volume. Otherwise, drive will be used as a global hot spare backing all volumes for this controller. Note that drive must be as large as the smallest drive in all of the volumes it is going to back.
  • remove drive — Remove the hot spare drive from service. It will become a standalone drive.

🌸 EXAMPLES 🌸

Mark the drive at bus 0 target 4 as offline:

mptutil offline 0:4

Create a RAID1 array from the two standalone drives da1 and da2:

mptutil create raid1 da1,da2

Mark standalone drive da3 as a global hot spare:

mptutil add da3

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

mpt(4)

💜 HISTORY 💜

The mptutil utility first appeared in FreeBSD 8.0. (A whole era. 👑)

💀 BUGS 💀

Okay bestie, listen up, because this part is important. The handling of spare drives appears to be unreliable. The mpt(4) firmware manages spares via spare drive “pools”. There are eight pools numbered 0 through 7. Each spare drive can only be assigned to a single pool. Each volume can be backed by any combination of zero or more spare pools. The mptutil utility attempts to use the following algorithm for managing spares. Global spares are always assigned to pool 0, and all volumes are always backed by pool 0. For dedicated spares, mptutil assigns one of the remaining 7 pools to each volume and assigns dedicated drives to that pool. In practice however, it seems that assigning a drive as a spare does not take effect until the box has been rebooted. Also, the firmware renumbers the spare pool assignments after a reboot which undoes the effects of the algorithm above. Simple cases such as assigning global spares seem to work ok (albeit requiring a reboot to take effect) but more “exotic” configurations may not work reliably. 🙈

Drive configuration commands result in an excessive flood of messages on the console. (Like, chill fr fr 😭)

The mpt version 1 API that is used by mptutil and mpt(4) does not support volumes above two terabytes. This is a limitation of the API. If you are using this adapter with volumes larger than two terabytes, use the adapter in JBOD mode. Utilize geom(8), zfs(8), or another software volume manager to work around this limitation. No cap, that's the tea. 🍵

That's the whole page, bestie. Every flag, every warning, every chaotic spare-pool detail. You're welcome. 💅✨

This was the mptutil(8) manual page from Debian, dated May 24, 2023 — System Manager's Manual energy, rewritten with love and zero missing details. 🫶

📦 where this page comes from