LSI Updates and Pi
There’s no possible way to make a Raspberry Pi-joke that hasn’t already been made.
LSI
So far so good. Things’ve been working fine, though I have to look into disabling the bios since I’m not booting from any drives that are behind the LSI card. Boot times are three times as long as without the card, even though the OS is loading from the Samsung 840 Pro SSD drive.
I used MegaRaid Storage Manager for Windows to install the latest BIOS for my card. I went to the LSI site, searched for Host Bus Adapters -> LSI SAS 9211-8i -> Firmware, and downloaded the only available package (at the time this was named “9211-8i_Package_P17_IR_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows”, released Aug 09, 2013, the same package as for the IR-firmware installed in the previous post). Inside the archive, you will find various folders. Look in the folder “sasbios_rel” and check that you have mptsas2.rom in there. That’s the BIOS image.
The good news is, as I mentioned, once you have the Storage Manager software installed, and your card is recognized, you can flash the BIOS from Windows without issues. This should also work for Firmware, but I haven’t tried this yet, as I am already running the latest IR-firmware. Open up SM, and somewhere in the middle you will find Update Firmware. There, select BIOS (middle selection for me), and browse to the folder mentioned earlier. Inside, select the mptsas2.rom file. Hit OK, and it will ask you to check a box and confirm that you want to update the BIOS. After that, it’ll flash, and tell you when it is done. It will show you the old BIOS version until you reboot. My card was 7.29.0.0, and is now 7.33.0.0. Improvements are minimal, but there were some.
One note on the Write Cache, mentioned in the last post. I was unable to enable this from Storage Manager. Perhaps due to the fact that there is no battery backup unit. I’ll have to look more into this at a later date.
PI
Got me a Pi. The B model, from local RS reseller, Yleiselektroniikka. Cost me 47 bucks including taxes. It’s the revised Model B, with 512MB memory. I also got a transparent case, which was 10 bucks. I didn’t get a powersupply, because I have plenty of USB chargers for various devices (and a few generic ones) that provide 1A+ @5V. My HTC Desire Z charger powered the Pi just fine, even though there’ve been reports of “flaky” mobile phone chargers not working with the Pi.
I have an 8 GB Verbatim SD-card for this project, and I dropped the latest NOOBS image from the Raspberry Pi homepage on the card, after formating the card FAT. I then installed Raspbian from the NOOBS-installer, and proceeded to do an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade, which also upgraded the Pi bootloader to the latest version (as was recommended by the small booklet that came with the Pi.)
I haven’t done much with the device yet (joining the club of Pi owners everywhere! :)), except hook things up and tried it out a bit. It works great! Or just as advertised. Obviously the boot is a little bit slow, but nothing out of the ordinary, considering the specs. HDMI out works fine; I use an HDMI -> DVI cable for this.