PCI-E add-on Success & Failures

[nuumio]

I think firmware update might have gotten my Marvell 9230 (manufactured by Delock) to work correctly. Old version was 1.0.0.1024 bios + 2.3.0.1065 fw. The one I flashed was 1.0.0.1027 bios + 2.3.0.1076 fw. I used x86_64 pc + UEFI shell to update it. Googling "marvell 9230 firmware download" gave me few helpful links:

• https://homeservershow.com/forums/topic/...ent=142560
  and from there: https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/...PEXSAT34RH
  
• https://homeservershow.com/forums/topic/...ent=148171
  and from there: https://www.digitus.info/en/products/com...s-30104-1/
  
• ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/ISO_Extracted/C...efi64/bin/
  

Those homerservershow posts gave links to one FW which should be the same as I have and then a newer one. I wasn't exactly sure if one manufacturers FW is combatible with another so I checked md5 from FW downloaded from Startech site and from FW read from my 9230 and they matched. So I gave the newer FW from Digitus a go and it seems to be working. More than 10 Btrfs scrubs in a row without any problems and it also seems to perform a bit better as scrubs are faster.

The link to supermicro has EFI program for doing the update. Packages from Startech and Digitus seemed to be Dos only. I already had UEFI shell from https://github.com/tianocore/edk2 (used one from tag edk2-stable201811) on one USB drive to I just copied files from Supermicro and Digitus there.

Don't try this yourself if you don't know what you're doing!  Read instructions from packages you download! Take backups! I didn't use the update script myself (go.nsh) because I didn't get it to do backup (maybe I was using it the wrong way). I just used commands seen in the script in command prompt. Dos boot + go.bat may be easier way.

My steps in short (read go.nsh/go.bat for details or just the go.* script):
- Boot to UEFI BIOS and start shell (correct way may depend on UEFI BIOS manufacturer)
- Select USB filesystem and cd to correct dir if needed
- Read paramfile from 9230: mvf.efi -getparm 9230.par -cdid 9230 -adid 0
- Check paramfile (RevId 10=ImageA0.bin, 11=ImageA1.bin): type 9230.par
- Backup: mvf.efi -rfb 9230-backup.bin -addr 0 -sz 0x7b000 -cdid 9230 -adid 0
- Full backup (check size from paramfile): mvf.efi -rfb 9230-backup-full.bin -addr 0 -sz 0x80000 -cdid 9230 -adid 0
- Flash (check RevId/image from paramfile): mvf.efi -wbf ImageA1.bin -addr 0 -cdid 9230 -adid 0

Maybe that older FW had some bug which just happened to occur more frequently with RP64 than in x86(_64) PCs.