Hi, I recently acquired an Asus Z390M-Pro Gaming motherboard, to replace my old desktop rig. I'm no gamer but I chose this motherboard for all the equipment it provides (USB 3.1 gen 1 and 2, USB type C, 6 SATA ports, 2 M.2 ports, etc etc). As its name suggests, it's equipped with an Intel Z390 chipset, which offers fake RAID through Intel Rapid Storage Technology. In the BIOS, I enabled Intel RST and created a RAID 1 array with two Samsung EVO 970 NVMe M.2 500 GB SSD disks. Unfortunately, on a recent distro (Debian Buster installer alpha 5, with mdadm v4.1-rc1 and kernel 4.19.12), the array is not found by the system. It seems that the M.2 ports are not seen at all by mdadm : -----%<----- # mdadm --detail-platform Platform : Intel(R) Rapid Storage Technology Version : 16.5.0.3492 RAID Levels : raid0 raid1 raid10 raid5 Chunk Sizes : 4k 8k 16k 32k 64k 128k 2TB volumes : supported 2TB disks : supported Max Disks : 15 Max Volumes : 2 per array, 4 per controller I/O Controller : /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:17:0 (SATA) Port0 : - no device attached - Port1 : - no device attached - Port2 : - no device attached - Port3 : - no device attached - Port4 : - no device attached - Port5 : - no device attached - ----->%----- As you can see, only the 6 SATA ports are reported by mdadm, not the two M.2 ports (on which the NVMe disks are connected). I'd prefer to use Intel RST instead of software RAID because I intend to also install Windows on this computer to play games from time to time, and I'd like it to benefit from the RAID setup. So my question is simple : do you think it's a bug in mdadm, the kernel RAID driver, or the motherboard firmware ? If the problem lies in mdadm or the kernel, it would be a hopeful situation because I'm sure it will be fixed one day or the other, and since I use Debian for 20 years now, I think I may be able to find my way with a patch by creating a custom installer image. On the contrary, if the problem lies in the motherboard, I won't be too hopeful; I know Intel is quite cooperative with the OSS community, but I don't know about Asus, and since some of their proprietary technologies (like Aura Sync for example) are not supported at all on Linux, I guess they're reluctant to release their specs, so I don't count on them to work on this problem, let alone release a firmware upgrade only to fix this). Please tell me there is hope :) Thanks in advance. Regards, -- Raphaël Halimi
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