PCI Express x4 Device Support

[amiraeva]

Have you had any further success with these cards?  I too was looking to use them in the NAS Enclosure for a Ceph on arm64 build using Ayufan's buster image.  

-Nate

Sorry, I should have posted my progress on these boards earlier.
 
I have two variations of the LSI Logic 9211-4i SAS RAID Controller working in two systems with Rockpro64's. 
 
One is the stock LSI 3/4 length board which is available on Amazon, eBay, etc.  This is a 4x board with a SAS connector out.

https://www.amazon.com/LSI-Logic-9211-4i...B005UO2I4M

I'm using this board's SAS out port to the SAS in on an Intel RES2SV240 RAID 24 port SAS Expander Card.  

https://www.ebay.com/itm/153474385994?it...fresh=true  

From the expander I can address up to 20 sata drives or more SAS expanders.  I have this working in IT mode with Ayufan's recent (last month) Openmedia vault build. Thank you - Ayufan.  This is running in a re-claimed mini tower case with the re-claimed 300 watt power supply. I have tested and accessed twelve (12) drives through Linux and OpenMedia Vault with this build.
 
The second system is using a 1/2 length variation from Crossfield - same LSI 9211-4i chipset re-designed for 1/2 length.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/New-LSI-9211-4i...4902.l9144
 
I have this in a custom 4 drive NAS enclosure using 3d printed & MakerBeam components  also running Ayufan's Openmedia vault in IT mode. Thanks again - Ayufan. It is running off an external power supply (Meanwell 160w) to a matching internal pico-power supply. That cleans up and distributes sufficient power to the drives, boards and fans while being ~90% efficient so the system idles around 22watts.  All these boards, 9211, SAS Expander, & RockPro have heatsinks that require air flow to be effective.  I have two in push-pull on the NAS and a couple in the mini-tower.

Both cards booted directly with the Openmedia vault builds. There are "oh-by-the-ways" however which are probably a function of my super-limited linux knowledge.  

While these versions of Linux recognize and effectively support the boards, I cannot get any version of the SAS2Flash, SAS2IRCU or LSIUtil to run from the command line.  MPT3SAS and MPT2SAS (drivers?) both load at bootup but I can't re-flash the boards while installed in the RockPro64 nor can I load any BIOS/firmware app to configure the boards in IR (integrated Raid) mode.  IT mode is working fine with OpenMedia vault but I would like to benchmark and experiment with the IR mode.  
 
Any suggestions or workarounds would be appreciated.

I recently got a rockpro64 with an LSI 9211-8i. I got the card working with ayufan's 5.6 kernel minimal debian build; but u-boot doesn't have drivers for SAS cards so you'll need eMMC or an SD card to store a /boot partition if you want to run root on a device off the card. If this is your goal, you should have few if any problems but have a serial cable handy.

I couldn't get the card to boot with Arch or Manjaro (~5.7 kernel) which is my preferred environment. The boot process and serial console seems to hang once u-boot tries to load the kernel. Many u-boot builds floating around crash when trying to query the card. I gave up and ordered a SATA card (JMB585 chipset) which works well with u-boot and the Arch kernel. I'm now happily booting off an SSD with an HDD array running my NAS workloads.