MFIUTIL(8) System Manager's Manual MFIUTIL(8)

mfiutil —
Utility for managing LSI MegaRAID SAS controllers

mfiutil version

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show adapter

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show battery

mfiutil [-d] [-e] [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show config

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show drives

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show events [-c class] [-l locale] [-n count] [-v] [start [stop]]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show firmware

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show foreign [volume]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show logstate

mfiutil [-d] [-e] [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show patrol

mfiutil [-d] [-e] [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show progress

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] show volumes

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] fail drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] good drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] rebuild drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] syspd drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] drive progress drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] drive clear drive {start | stop}

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] start rebuild drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] abort rebuild drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] locate drive {on | off}

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] cache volume [setting [value] [...]]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] name volume name

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] volume progress volume

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] clear

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] create type [-v] [-s stripe_size] drive[,drive[,...]] [drive[,drive[,...]]]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] delete volume

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] add drive [volume]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] remove drive

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] start patrol

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] stop patrol

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] patrol command [interval [start]]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] foreign scan

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] foreign clear [config]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] foreign diag [config]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] foreign preview [config]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] foreign import [config]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] flash file

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] start learn

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] bbu setting value

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] ctrlprop rebuild [rate]

mfiutil [-t drv_type] [-u unit] ctrlprop alarm [on|off]

The mfiutil utility can be used to display or modify various parameters on LSI MegaRAID SAS RAID controllers. Each invocation of mfiutil consists of zero or more global options followed by a command. Commands may support additional optional or required arguments after the command.

Currently two global options are supported:

drv_type
(FreeBSD only) drv_type specifies the type of driver to work with; it takes either mfi or mrsas. The default type is mrsas if this tool was invoked as mrsasutil, otherwise mfi.

(Solaris only) drv_type specifies the type of driver to work with. The default type is mr_sas.

unit
unit specifies the unit of the controller to work with. If no unit is specified, then unit 0 is used.

Various commands accept either or both of the two options:

Print numeric device IDs as drive identifier. This is the default. Useful in combination with -e to print both, numeric device IDs and enclosure:slot information.
Print drive identifiers in enclosure:slot form. See next paragraph on format details in context of input rather than output.

Drives may be specified in two forms. First, a drive may be identified by its device ID. The device ID for configured drives can be found in show config. Second, a drive may be identified by its location as [Exx:]Syy where xx is the enclosure and yy is the slot for each drive as displayed in show drives.

A volume may be identified by its target ID. Alternatively, when working with mfi(4) driver, the volume may also be specified by the corresponding mfidX device name, such as mfid0.

The mfiutil utility supports several different groups of commands. The first group of commands provide information about the controller, the volumes it manages, and the drives it controls. The second group of commands are used to manage the physical drives attached to the controller. The third group of commands are used to manage the logical volumes managed by the controller. The fourth group of commands are used to manage the drive configuration for the controller. The fifth group of commands are used to manage controller-wide operations.

The informational commands include:

Displays the version of mfiutil.
Displays information about the RAID controller such as the model number.
Displays information about the battery from the battery backup unit.
Displays the volume and drive configuration for the controller. Each array is listed along with the physical drives the array is built from. Each volume is listed along with the arrays that the volume spans. If any hot spare drives are configured, then they are listed as well.
Lists all of the physical drives attached to the controller.
[-c class] [-l locale] [-n count] [-v] [start [stop]]
Display entries from the controller's event log. The controller maintains a circular buffer of events. Each event is tagged with a class and locale.

The class parameter limits the output to entries at the specified class or higher. The default class is “warn”. The available classes from lowest priority to highest are:

Debug messages.
Periodic progress updates for long-running operations such as background initializations, array rebuilds, or patrol reads.
Informational messages such as drive insertions and volume creations.
Indicates that some component may be close to failing.
A component has failed, but no data is lost. For example, a volume becoming degraded due to a drive failure.
A component has failed resulting in data loss.
The controller itself has died.

The locale parameter limits the output to entries for the specified part of the controller. The default locale is “all”. The available locales are “volume”, “drive”, “enclosure”, “battery”, “sas”, “controller”, “config”, “cluster”, and “all”.

The count parameter is a debugging aid that specifies the number of events to fetch from the controller for each low-level request. The default is 15 events.

By default, matching event log entries from the previous shutdown up to the present are displayed. This range can be adjusted via the start and stop parameters. Each of these parameters can either be specified as a log entry number or as one of the following aliases:

The newest entry in the event log.
The oldest entry in the event log.
The first entry since the event log was cleared.
The entry in the event log corresponding to the last time the controller was cleanly shut down.
The entry in the event log corresponding to the most recent boot.
Lists all of the firmware images present on the controller.
Displays detected foreign configurations on disks for importation or removal.
Display the various sequence numbers associated with the event log.
Display the status of the controller's patrol read operation.
Report the current progress and estimated completion time for active operations on all volumes and drives.
Lists all of the logical volumes managed by the controller.

The physical drive management commands include:

drive
Mark drive as failed. Drive must be an online drive that is part of an array.
drive
Mark drive as an unconfigured good drive. Drive must not be part of an existing array.
drive
Mark a failed drive that is still part of an array as a good drive suitable for a rebuild. The firmware should kick off an array rebuild on its own if a failed drive is marked as a rebuild drive.
drive
Present the drive to the host operating system as a disk SYSPD block device in the format /dev/mfisyspdX. Clear this flag with good drive
drive
Report the current progress and estimated completion time of drive operations such as rebuilds or patrol reads.
drive {start | stop}
Start or stop the writing of all 0x00 characters to a drive.
drive
Manually start a rebuild on drive.
drive
Abort an in-progress rebuild operation on drive. It can be resumed with the start rebuild command.
drive {on | off}
Change the state of the external LED associated with drive.

The logical volume management commands include:

volume [setting [value] [...]]
If no setting arguments are supplied, then the current cache policy for volume is displayed; otherwise, the cache policy for volume is modified. One or more setting arguments may be given. Some settings take an additional value argument as noted below. The valid settings are:
Enable caching for both read and write I/O operations.
Disable caching for both read and write I/O operations.
Enable caching only for read I/O operations.
Enable caching only for write I/O operations.
Use write-back policy for cached writes.
Use write-through policy for cached writes.
value
Set the read ahead policy for cached reads. The value argument can be set to either “none”, “adaptive”, or “always”.
value
Control the behavior of I/O write caching if the battery is dead or missing. The value argument can be set to either “disable” or “enable”. In general this setting should be left disabled to avoid data loss when the system loses power.
value
Control the write caches on the physical drives backing volume. The value argument can be set to either “disable”, “enable”, or “default”.

In general this setting should be left disabled to avoid data loss when the physical drives lose power. The battery backup of the RAID controller does not save data in the write caches of the physical drives.

volume name
Sets the name of volume to name.
volume
Report the current progress and estimated completion time of volume operations such as consistency checks and initializations.

The configuration commands include:

Delete the entire configuration including all volumes, arrays, and spares.
type [-v] [-s stripe_size] drive[,drive[,...]] [drive[,drive[,...]]]
Create a new volume. The type specifies the type of volume to create. Currently supported types include:
Creates a RAID0 volume for each drive specified. Each drive must be specified as a separate argument.
Creates one RAID0 volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
Creates one RAID1 volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
Creates one RAID5 volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
Creates one RAID6 volume spanning the drives listed in the single drive list.
Creates one RAID10 volume spanning multiple RAID1 arrays. The drives for each RAID1 array are specified as a single drive list.
Creates one RAID50 volume spanning multiple RAID5 arrays. The drives for each RAID5 array are specified as a single drive list.
Creates one RAID60 volume spanning multiple RAID6 arrays. The drives for each RAID6 array are specified as a single drive list.
Creates a single volume by concatenating all of the drives in the single drive list.

Note: Not all volume types are supported by all controllers.

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 arrays and arrays 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. Valid values are 512 through 1M, though the MFI firmware may reject some values.

volume
Delete the volume volume.
drive [volume]
Mark drive as a hot spare. Drive must be in the unconfigured good state. If volume is specified, then the hot spare will be dedicated to arrays backing that volume. Otherwise, drive will be used as a global hot spare backing all arrays for this controller. Note that drive must be as large as the smallest drive in all of the arrays it is going to back.
drive
Remove the hot spare drive from service. It will be placed in the unconfigured good state.

The controller management commands include:

command [interval [start]]
Set the patrol read operation mode. The command argument can be one of the following values:
Disable patrol reads.
Enable periodic patrol reads initiated by the firmware. The optional interval argument specifies the interval in seconds between patrol reads. If patrol reads should be run continuously, then interval should consist of the word “continuously”. The optional start argument specifies a non-negative, relative start time for the next patrol read. If an interval or start time is not specified, then the existing setting will be used.
Enable manual patrol reads that are only initiated by the user.
Start a patrol read operation.
Stop a currently running patrol read operation.
Scan for foreign configurations and display the number found. The config argument for the commands below takes the form of a number from 0 to the total configurations found.
[config]
Clear the specified foreign config or all if no config argument is provided.
[config]
Display a diagnostic display of the specified foreign config or all if no config argument is provided.
[config]
Preview the specified foreign config after import or all if no config argument is provided.
[config]
Import the specified foreign config or all if no config argument is provided.
file
Updates the flash on the controller with the firmware stored in file. A reboot is required for the new firmware to take effect.
Start a battery relearn. Note that this seems to always result in the battery being completely drained, regardless of the BBU mode. In particular, the controller write cache will be disabled during the relearn even if transparent learning mode is enabled.
setting value
Update battery backup unit (BBU) properties related to battery relearning. The following settings are configurable:
Add a delay to the next scheduled battery relearn event. This setting is given in hours and must lie in the range of 0 to 255.
Enable or disable automatic periodic battery relearning. The setting may be set to “enable” or “disable” to respectively enable or disable the relearn cycle. Alternatively, a mode of 0, 1 or 2 may be given. Mode 0 enables periodic relearning, mode 1 disables it, and mode 2 disables it and logs a warning to the event log when it detects that a battery relearn should be performed.
Set the BBU's mode of operation. This setting is not supported by all BBUs. Where it is supported, the possible values are the integers between 1 and 5 inclusive. Modes 1, 2 and 3 enable a transparent learn cycle, whereas modes 4 and 5 do not. The BBU's data retention time is greater when transparent learning is not used.
[rate]
With no arguments display the rate of rebuild (percentage)a for volumes. With an integer argument (0-100), set that value as the new rebuild rate for volumes.
[on|off]
With no arguments display the current alarm enable/disable status. With an on or an off argument, enable or disable alarm.

mfiutil makes no attempt to enumerate all the installed controllers; instead the correct unit number of the intended controller must be passed via global option -u, otherwise the controller with unit 0 is assumed.

The particular ways of listing controllers differ between different drivers and kernels; the following descriptions use X to indicate the unit number.

  • mfi(4) driver

    This driver creates a /dev/mfiX device node for each controller it attached. A list of the available device nodes can be queried using a shell command such as ls -l /dev/mfi[0-9]*.

  • mrsas(4) driver

    Similar to the mfi(4) driver, this driver creates a /dev/mrsasX device node for each controller it attached.

  • Linux megaraid_sas(4) driver

    This driver uses the global SCSI host unit number as the controller unit number; therefore if other SCSI host devices are also installed, multiple unit numbers are sometimes not continuous as users might expect.

    To find out the SCSI host unit numbers assigned to the installed controllers, list the sysfs directory /sys/class/scsi_host/, where /sys/class/scsi_host/hostX are symbolic links to different SCSI host device directories. For example:

    # ls -l /sys/class/scsi_host/

total 0

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 26 00:00 host0 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:02:00.0/host0/scsi_host/host0

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 26 00:00 host1 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:11.4/ata1/host1/scsi_host/host1

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 26 00:00 host2 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:11.4/ata2/host2/scsi_host/host2

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 26 00:00 host3 -> ../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.2/0000:05:00.0/host3/scsi_host/host3

    Manual inspection must be taken to distinguish MegaRAID SAS controllers from other devices if any.

    Newer versions of megaraid_sas(4) driver creates per-controller nodes in debugfs, so if the debugfs is mounted at conventional path, a clearer list of available controller can also be queried by listing /sys/kernel/debug/megaraid_sas/ directory. For example:

    # ls -l /sys/kernel/debug/megaraid_sas/

total 0

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 29 11:43 scsi_host0

drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 29 11:43 scsi_host3
  • Solaris kernel

    Drivers for Solaris kernel assign a per-driver instance number when a newly installed controller is probed; this number is then recorded, so it is generally persistent if the hardware configuration remain unchanged.

    The instance numbers can be queried from the path_to_inst(4) file. Simply search the double quoted driver name in it, by running

    grep -F \" driver\" /etc/path_to_inst

    For example, listing instances of the mr_sas(7D) driver would be look like:

    # /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -F \"mr_sas\" /etc/path_to_inst

"/pci@0,0/pci8086,2f02@1/pci1028,1f49@0" 0 "mr_sas"

"/pci@76,0/pci8086,2f04@2/pci1014,454@0" 1 "mr_sas"

    Then take an appropriate instance number for use in mfiutil.

If multiple supported controllers are installed in the system, it is suggested to run a

mfiutil -u X show adapter
first to ensure the unit number X is correct for the intended controller.

Configure the cache for volume mfid0 to cache only writes:

mfiutil cache mfid0 writes
mfiutil cache mfid0 write-back

Create a RAID5 array spanning the first four disks in the second enclosure:

mfiutil create raid5 e1:s0,e1:s1,e1:s2,e1:s4

Configure the first three disks on a controller as JBOD:

mfiutil create jbod 0 1 2

Create a RAID10 volume that spans two arrays each of which contains two disks from two different enclosures:

mfiutil create raid10 e1:s0,e1:s1 e2:s0,e2:s1

Add drive with the device ID of 4 as a global hot spare:

mfiutil add 4

Add the drive in slot 2 in the main chassis as a hot spare for volume mfid0:

mfiutil add s2 mfid0

Reconfigure a disk as a SYSPD block device with no RAID

mfiutil syspd 0

Configure the adapter to run periodic patrol reads once a week with the first patrol read starting in 5 minutes:

mfiutil patrol auto 604800 300

Display the second detected foreign configuration:

mfiutil show foreign 1

Set the current rebuild rate for volumes to 40%:

mfiutil ctrlprop rebuild 40

mfi(4), mrsas(4)

The mfiutil utility first appeared in FreeBSD 8.0.
2024 mfiutil 1.0.15-rivoreo-r1