rcraid-dkms

AMD RAIDXpert driver as DKMS package

Foreword:

Many AMD mainboards for the AM4 socket based on the following chipsets come with RAID support:

• X370
• X399
• X470
• X570

But this RAID mode, which needs to be set in the BIOS, requires a specific driver for each OS. There is a driver for Windows, but for Linux AMD provides either a binary blob or the sources. When following the instructions, you will need to recompile the driver and install the kernel module on each kernel update and/or upgrade. Since we are in the 21 century and we have software like DKMS, we don't need to do this manually, but let it happen automatically.

Goal

Therefore we try here to keep the code alive for many kernel versions as possible and deliver it within a PPA for Ubuntu as a DKMS package.

Installation

• Driver package for Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/~thopiekar/+archive/ubuntu/rcraid

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thopiekar/rcraid
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install rcraid-dkms

• Switching to RAID mode:
  • Boot Linux in AHCI mode.
  • Append modprobe.blacklist=ahci to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub
  • Run sudo update-grub
  • Restart
  • Switch to RAID mode
  • Boot your Linux installation from a RAID disk

Thanks go to..

• To AMD to hand out the driver as source code at least. (Some history: Just think about Intel Poulsbo..)
  • https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/x370 - section Linux
• To Martin Weber (@martinkarlweber) for sharing patches to make the driver work on Linux >= 4.15.x
  • https://github.com/martinkarlweber/rcraid-patches