firmware and hba

[ossupport55]

Dear all,

sorry to repeat the question but i have not yet found the answer.

Ok, the question is: How do i get to know which HBA is installed in terms of how HP referes to it on a qlogic based adapter which could be checked with the lspci command.

When is a HBA firware upgrade required and what is difference between the firmware and the bios.

cheers

[Matti_Kurkela]

> How do i get to know which HBA is installed

Please see:

http://driverdownloads.qlogic.com/QLogicDriverDownloads_UI/Product_detail.aspx?oemid=21

It has a nice table of QLogic model code vs. HP product number(s).

> When is a HBA firmware upgrade required

When the compatibility list document of your storage system says that a firmware version X (or above, maybe) is required for guaranteed interoperability with your HBA and your HBA's current firmware version is less than X, you should upgrade to the supported firmware version.

> what is difference between the firmware and the bios

System BIOS: a standard collection of mostly 16-bit firmware routines that enable a x86-based PC system to boot. Most modern systems will attempt to replace the functionality of the BIOS with 32-bit (or even 64-bit) driver code as soon as the OS boots up.

HBA BIOS (extension): a piece of mostly 16-bit firmware code on the HBA that runs on the system CPU.

It extends the system BIOS so that the standard functions of the system BIOS can operate this particular HBA. Required if you want to boot a x86 system from a disk accessible through this HBA, or if you want to run MS-DOS-based utilities on it (like older versions of Ghost).

If you dont run MS-DOS and don't boot from this HBA, you can usually completely ignore the HBA BIOS: when the OS loads a proper HBA driver, the HBA BIOS is usually switched off.

On some HBAs, this part of the HBA firmware can be changed to suit the architecture of the system that uses the HBA: typical alternatives are a BIOS module for x86 PCs, an EFI module for Itanium or OpenBoot module for SPARC architecture (Solaris).

HBA firmware: this is the "main" firmware of the HBA. It runs on the HBA itself, not on the system CPU. Without this, the card is dead. It handles many parts of the FibreChannel communication on its own, so that the system CPU can do more important things.

MK