Hello,
I have a raid array made up of 8 8TB intel NVMe drive raid together into raid 5 volume via intel VROC. clear linux live CD only see 4 drives (cannot even see 8 drives like Debian live CD) span across 1 CPU.
What I need is for clear linux to see the raid volume made by VROC. I know intel has redhat driver for it, does anyone know of a way to make this work where I can install Clear Linux into a raid 5 Volume.
As far as I know this type of RAID is not supported by Linux, at all. You should use Linux Software RAID instead.
Please refer to this user guide, dated November 2019, which discusses Intel VROC on Linux systems specifically. Section 3.1 lists the Linux distributions that support Intel VROC (namely, RHEL and SLES). I can confirm that Intel VROC works on Rhel 7.6.
Please refer to this FAQ which discusses Intel VROC technology generally. In particular, this technology is a special consequence of Intel’s CPU architecture (namely, the ability to connect NVMe drives directly to Xeon PCie lanes). To the best of my knowledge, Intel VROC is the most performant RAID solution when dealing with large arrays of NVMe drives.
It is perplexing that Clear Linux, being Intel’s operating system, does not support Intel VROC, being Intel’s high performance RAID solution. This seems to be exactly the type of feature that Clear Linux should support, given the operating system’s goal to extract maximum capabilities from Intel CPUs.
@rdas honestly we don’t even know anything about it at this point, you are more informed than me. That certainly isn’t a good sign, but, it’s not a failure on my part - Intel is large enough that stuff like this can exist without others within the same company knowing that it does.
For instance, only just now have I found Resources for Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) which shows that this should be working on Linux. But that article refers to a 3.10 kernel for RHEL, which is ancient (almost a decade old?) to say the least. Maybe this just works and it’s enabled? I can’t find anything relevant in the Linux kernel, I can’t find any docs online what kernel component is needed… No wonder I have no clue!
Yeah, if this isn’t impossible due to something currently unforeseen, I’d love to enable this in ClearLinux, but, I am still searching for information that confirms that this is in the upstream Linux kernel and just needs turning on (and maybe a modified mdadm and ledmon?).
More confusion - seems that RST might be enough to have this working? I’m so confused…
Oooohh
https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/VMD.html
Which we have as a module (CONFIG_VMD), as well as CONFIG_INTEL_RST.