RAID Card Passthrough support

Project Justification: Our software relies on disk serial numbers and model information to track disk wipe status and history. Increasingly, RAID cards do not pass disk information through to the operating system by default, if at all. We need a way to interface with the RAID cards to either a) enable direct access to disks attached to the RAID card; or b) enable access to the disk information via communication with the RAID card. We are interested in the following disk information in (roughly) descending priority: Serial Number of the disk Capacity of the disk Model information of the disk Ability to issue ATA/SCSI commands directly to the disk Ability to extract S.M.A.R.T. information from the disk Project Scope: To provide a programmatic way to enable passthrough support on a RAID card that natively supports disk passthrough functionality (i.e. HBA or IT mode) so our software can access the disk attributes listed above. To provide a method to access disk attributes (as detailed above) for disks attached to a computer via a RAID card that does not natively support passthrough; this solution could entail development of kernel drivers or device firmware to support HBA PASSTHROUGH on certain RAID cards. Achieving the above would a. Allow our software to interact directly with the drive rather than relying on the RAID card for information such as serial number, SMART data, etc b. Allow us to avoid performance bottlenecks associated with the RAID controller functions when writing large amounts of data to disks connected to the RAID card c. Allow WipeOS to programmatically put the card into PASSTHROUGH mode without requiring the user to reboot into the card’s BIOS to configure an option that may not be there. Project Deliverables: Automatic HBA PASSTHROUGH capabilities on the most popular RAID cards that do not expose a HBA mode directly. Project Success: The biggest challenge is getting the Kernel Drivers for HBA PASSTHROUGH working on the largest subset of cards. The more drivers that we have, the higher coverage we will have. Our wiping solution needs to be fast, running at least 80MB/s on SATA 2 drives, but the higher the write speed, the better.