A9784 HBA firmware upgrade on PA-RISC systems

[Peter van der Sar]

The firmware of the A9784 HBA of several of our PA-RISC systems is outdated (v3.2.168). The only firmware (v3.3.154) I could find was apparently targeted for Itanium systems, since it needs an EFI shell.
The file I found was efi_147.tar.gz

How can I update the firmware of this HBA without EFI?


Grtz,

Peter van der Sar

[Luk Vandenbussche · Accepted solution]

Peter,

You need the firmware for a PA-RISC server.
Check this pdf for more info
http://docs.hp.com/en/J6374-90038/J6374-90038.pdf

[Torsten.]

If there is no firmware update available, there is no update needed normally.

AFAIK the updated firmware only affects EFI based systems, because it is related to boot an Integrity server from EFI shell via this card.

[Sameer_Nirmal]

Hi,

There is no interface available for updating the HBA firmware on PA-RISC systems. As per the compatibility matrix, version v3.2.168 or later is required if using this HBA on PA-RISC system. You might see latest card having recent version and you can use them on PA-RISC systems, but no way to upgrade their firmware on these systems.
Be aware the RISC firmware mentioned in the following link is for QL ISP23xx RISC chipset.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=329290&prodSeriesId=421119&swItem=ux-36358-1&prodNameId=421118&swEnvOID=54&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=1

The HBA firmware upgrade is possible on Integrity servers as they are EFI compliant.
EFI is being universaly adopted and Qlogic does support it too.

[Torsten.]

@Sameer:

" There is no interface available for updating the HBA firmware on PA-RISC systems"

Just to clarify, if really needed, HBAs can be updated with STM or in case of fibre channel cards with fcmsutil.
But I remember only a certain SCSI card some years ago.

[Torsten.]

Just to add this - according to the precision architecture (PA in PA-RISC) all boot related functionality of a HBA comes from the servers firmware (PDC) - most of the functionality while the OS is running is related to the driver. For this and other reasons keep your firmware (PDC) and drivers (patches) up to date.

[Peter van der Sar]

Thanks guys!

It appeared that the file ql2312fw.bin in the archive efi_147.tar.gz is indeed the firmware that I needed.
I simply did not know that I needed to use fcmsutil to update the firmware.
The firmware has now been succesfully updated.

P.S. I also did not know that there's 50% chance that the systems crash during the update. After a crash a retry of the firmware update was always succesful. :-|

[Peter van der Sar]

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