No AMD-RAID support built-in on Linux

Hardware Motherboards
1

Hello guys.

So yeah, it has been almost 2 years that the Ryzen lineup was released, and up to this point, we have no native support for the AMD-RAID capability, which boggles my mind, since it is a chipset level implementation. A new chipset family was released (X/B4xx chipsets), no support has been offered by AMD for Linux x86_64, and we have to deal with old X/B3xx drivers, that haven’t been updated since March/2017, and with that, we only have support for old kernels, meaning that we have to force the injection of the driver on newer kernels. Can we get a Open Source version of this driver? I know that it wasn’t developed by AMD, but they should at least force the company that developed the RAID subsystem to give us newer versions of the driver. They made a new version for the X/B4xx chipsets only for Windows, no Linux support.

No one has some update for this situation?

2

I think a lot of the lack of support has to do with most of the people that could work on support not trusting hw raid(or at least consumer hw raid) and therefore not having a reason to use it, and therefore not working on Linux support.

3 Likes
3

I haven’t tried it, but You could check out the write up:
https://www.kwikr.de//Howto_Windows_Ubuntu_AMD-RAID.html

Found this on the AMD forum here:
https://community.amd.com/thread/222449

If it doesn’t help, I’ll edit it out of my comment

4

If you’re running linux there are plenty of better options.

“Hardware raid” from a motherboard chipset is mostly what is called “Fake raid”

See here:
https://skrypuch.com/raid/

If you’re running linux, you probably would be better off with one of the variety of software raid implementations or ZFS.

“Fake raid” is only really of use on shitty platforms like windows that don’t have decent software raid implementations inside of the OS.

2 Likes
5

Agreed. I don’t trust board-specific implimentations of things.

If I can’t move my array between systems, it feels a lot like vendor lock-in. Avoiding that is one of the main reasons I use Linux in the first place.

3 Likes
6

You can probably mount AMD raid with the right params. There would be no reason to use amdraid instead of md on Linux.

3 Likes
7

@wendell are you saying the RAIDXpert2 somehow works through md on linux ? I only found this for linux and it seems a bit unsupported ? GitHub - thopiekar/rcraid-dkms: AMD RAIDXpert driver as DKMS package

I have the ASUS PRO WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI with ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 that comes with it, I am able to configure raid in bios using RAIDXpert2 but in linux it still shows up as separate drives.

8

yeah, it’s software raid. One only needs raidxpert2 if one requires a bootable windows raid volume. Do you really need that?

If not either md or windows’ soft raid is functionally the same but windows soft raid will work on either platform. Though I guess you’d also be using ntfs on linux…

9

Hmm, thought this RAIDXpert2 is to make VROC work and I should magically get superpowers on that card :frowning:

So in general, 4x NVME inside ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 is not giving some extra bandwidth comparing to have them installed in separate PCIe slots yeah ? Even with VROC enabled. Is this whole VROC mainly just for RAID performance and if write separately to each drive there is no benefit of having raid0 at all (in VROC context) ?

10

vroc is an intel platform thing. threadripper and related is so fast the performance benefit, vis a vis, everything else is negligible performance overhead of the os’s built-in soft raid solutions. vroc has some hardware acceleration, this is true, but its really not doing a lot for you in the grand scheme of things.

vroc – it really could have been something but the ‘vroc key’ and finding a way to monetize every little thing killed it dead.

3 Likes
11

ha! thanks @wendell I was originally planning to have vroc on WS-C621E-SAGE (before your youtube video sold me threadripper :smiley: I guess I will be returning the VROC key now :+1: