Another report about new experiments in hardware with Mac OS X (10.5.x) and my Power Mac G5 (PCI/PCI-X slot model). This time it was an LSI Logic SAS 3041X-R PCI-X card with 4 ports - card supports SAS, SATA-I and SATA-II devices.

I first thought about Serial Attached SCSI when I configured my Xserve. Inside it uses LSI1064 chip which is supported by Mac OS X in AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext. So I bought the LSI card and started to installation process. The card doesn't work "Out Of The Box", because some modification is needed in the kernel extension.

I added to Info.plist of AppleLSIFusionMPT.kext in SAS array another string - <string>pci1005,0050</string> (that's the LSI card ID) - after that, card started to work normally.
(Reader FYI - always have a backup copy before editing. I've done similar edits (card ID) some years back to get a Microsoft (broadcom based) 802.11G card to work with Apple's airport extension and similar edits to get a Linksys USB 802.11N adapter (which has 5GHz support) to work with Ralink's OS X drivers. (In both cases the device ID was not in the std driver plist.) If you see the extension not load after the edit (and reboot) - try repairing permissions.)

It worked under Mac OS X 10.5.8 and works well, but this card is not bootable as I expected. (On Xserve this chip is bootable.) (LSI Card has no mac rom) This card will work only on PCI-X Power Mac G5 Systems with Mac OS 10.4.7 through 10.5.8.
-Viktor D.