HighPoint Rocket Raid driver breaks FreeBSD
Sunday, July 12th, 2009I run a FreeBSD box with two SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 SATA controller providing 8 SATA ports each. Nice setup for a ZFS fileserver.
Unfortunately since 6.3 or so, FreeBSD comes with the hptrr binary blob driver from Highpoint. The hptrr driver breaks detection of the SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controllers (which are handled by the ata driver).
Unfortunately the hptrr is compiled in into recent GENERIC cernels and can not be disabled. To disable it you have to edit the kernel configuration and comment out the “device hptrr # Highpoint RocketRAID 17xx, 22xx, 23xx, 25xx” line and rebuild the kernel.
You also have to add the line ‘hptrr_load=”NO”‘ to /boot/loader.conf.
Very annoying.