[mdlug] nVidia SATA BIOS RAID

[Michael ORourke]

I have a Dell desktop system that I put into service as a server.
It has 3 SATA 640GB drives.
2 of the drives are setup as RAID1 leveraging the nVidia BIOS.  As you can see below, the system recognizes the RAID volume for /boot (notice the strange device name it assigns), the other filesystems (not shown) are under LVM control or standard partitioning (e.g. /dev/sdc1).  Also, there is a sata_nv driver that is loaded.

mike at serv1:~> df -h /boot
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/nvidia_feggjfad_part1
                       69M   20M   46M  30% /boot

mike at serv1:~> lsmod | grep sata
sata_nv                21588  4
libata                161216  1 sata_nv

My question is simply, how do I query the status of the RAID set from the OS?  Since it is not actually software raid, I can't query /proc/mdstat.  I've poked around /proc quite a bit, but can't seem to find anything that looks helpful.  The OS can definetly see all 3 drives.

serv1:/proc/scsi # cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD6401AALS-0 Rev: 01.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi1 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD6401AALS-0 Rev: 01.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi2 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: TSSTcorp Model: CDRWDVD TS-H493A Rev: D200
  Type:   CD-ROM                           ANSI  SCSI revision: 05
Host: scsi3 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: WDC WD6401AALS-0 Rev: 01.0
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI  SCSI revision: 05

So it's not masking the devices from the OS (like some hardware raid controlers might).  From the Google searches that I have done, the nVidia Bios RAID is what is commonly referred to as "fake RAID".  Not a true hardware RAID implementation.  The good news is the OS does recognize the RAID volume that I created from the BIOS, but it would be very helpful to have some sort of utility to query the status of the RAID.

Anybody use this driver (sata_nv) and/or have some suggestions?

-Mike