LSI MegaRAID SAS 8208XLP to Debian

Prehistory

I got the controller LSI 8208XLP. And with it - the task of making this miracle piece of iron work under Linux. No built-in RAID functions were required of it, it was enough just to see the disks connected to it. Further, it would be my mdadm or a little less beloved lvm. It would seem, what is easier? He poked the controller, connected the disks - and forward. The hardware is quite old, Debian has been around for the first year, and it probably has the right driver included.
Almost.

Problems

To begin with, the 8208XLP is a soft-raid. That is, the array of the BIOS available on it is assembled, but it can work only after installing the drivers. However, in contrast to the same softraid in intel chipsets, where unified driver disks combined into an array are displayed as normal, in this case disks are not displayed at all. That is, using it as “just another 8 SATA ports” just won't work. Even to see a single connected drive, no driver at all.
And then there is problem number 2: on the official website, the LSI driver is available under Windows systems, under Red Hat 4, 5 and SLES from 9 to 11. Moreover, the driver package uses DKMS, and according to the attached instructions it is not installed. Probably, in addition to the binary itself, the DKMS, the driver and the source code of the current kernel also require the source of the driver. I will not say this - this assumption is based on digging in the ancient branches of various forums and error messages during installation. In the instructions about this, not a word, correspondence on this topic with LSI support is still in progress.

What was done, but did not help

I will briefly describe the path traveled:
Attempting to "just install Debian" and see the disks, as I said, failed. The disk installer does not see, after installing the system on a separate carrier, they, of course, refused to appear magically.
ls -la / dev / sd * output the expected system hard and nothing else.
Attempt to put CentOS 6.5 - the same story. Plus, the driver from the site was not installed.
An attempt to force this (already cursed) piece of iron to work on SLES11 SP3 also failed. The driver did not see the driver on the flash drive, without it the installer does not see the disks, after installing it on a separate hard disk there is no driver, it is not installed, the same story with DKMS and sources.
The only successful moment is an attempt to install CentOS 5.4. Her installer ate the driver from the flash drive (megasr-13.15.1218.2009-1-rhel50-u4-all.img) and found the disks. However, there was no particular desire to remain at such an ancient core. One thing pleased - the problem is technically solvable, the device is working, I decided to dig further.

What ultimately helped

In the course of the excavation, I repeatedly met the mention of the magically collected megasr driver for Debian, but the years that have passed since the discussion, the link managed to die, and I could not find anything like that in the repository.
In the process I came across this curious comment in the hwraid bugtracker: hwraid.le-vert.net/ticket/4#no2
It turns out that a similar map (8208ELP) works under the mptsas driver, which is in Debian. It remains to understand two things - “how to make this thing work” and “what is the PCI ID of my controller”?
The answer to the first question was found in the comments here: weeclemans.livejournal.com/12086.html?thread=310
In fact, it suffices to add mptsas to / etc / modules and a line like

echo "0x1000 0x????" >/sys/bus/pci/drivers/mptsas/new_id 

in /etc/rc.local
I did not plan to install the OS on the disks connected to this controller initially, so if they are determined after the system is started, this option will suit me perfectly.
Now it only remains to find the PCI ID for my card. Unfortunately, lspci did not provide such information, so the necessary values ​​were taken from here: mirror.szepe.net/siv/pcidevs.txt
For 8208XLP, the 0x1000 0x0055 option came up.
After the reboot, the disks connected to the controller were correctly defined, even their SMART is available.