[Sticky] Big Sur on M1 machines and SoftRAID issues

@dmwfotos

Feel free to attach the support file.

We are slowly understanding this Big Sur issue. Once we do, we hope to be able to anticipate it. and guide the user past the various security issues.

@softraid-support

@dmwfotos

Interesting the file is still there, as you mentioned, but not listed as "loadable". That is why SoftRAID is working, but I don't know what the change was.

thanks!

Hello,
I had already written on the forum and I come back because I have a problem.
As a reminder, I have a MacMini M1 with a ThunderBay4 and 4 hard drives of 6 TB each. I made a certification of the disks which lasted several days, then I selected my 4 hard drives that I initialized in SOFTRAID (beta version), then I created a new volume in HFS + with the default parameters , everything is going well and I have the RAID5 volume which appears in the right column but it is not mounted and refuses to mount when I force it ... Suddenly the RAID does not appear on my desktop.
Is this normal?

Clarification :
When creating the volume, SOFTRAID informed me that it could not create a file system on the volume. Then it shows me everything as if it was okay (except that the disk is not mounted).

The SoftRAID driver is not loading, I suspect.

Did you "Allow" OWC as an identified developer in System Preferences/Security?

If you paste this commend into the terminal.app, does it show nothing? or show 6.0 b48 is loading?

sudo kextstat -b com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID

@softraid-support

There was one other file that I removed. That one did not reappear. That may have been the problem. It was PromiseS???. I'm not sure why it was there.

@dmwfotos

These are "bundled" drivers. Its possible they are triggering issues with Big Sur. I do not know enough yet to do more than guess.

Running 6.0.1 b48 on M1 Air with ThunderBay 4 RAID with 4 WD 6TB Red+ drives.

Certification and initialization went without problems (kind of).
Created RAID 5 and start copying data with CCC app. Everything was fine for ~ 70% of 900GB data then Air went into Kernel panic and debuted. Rebut was slow and after rebut computer was sluggish. In SoftRaid volume was marked as Unmounted, but visible in Finder.
I tried to mount it and got second panic. Disconnected ThunderBay during rebut and Air buts up fast as usual and was responsive as usual. Connected back ThunderBay and without mounting volume in SR restart cloning. While I was typing this message got 3rd panic.
ThunderBay is disconnected now since I would say it's unusable as it is and it doesn't make me happy since I need it and ~$1K investment is unusable.

I don't know how to attach panic report since either ZIP to TXT not allowed. I can copy paste all 3 of them, but it will be quite long.

I would really appreciate any suggestion how to resolve it and make it usable.

Thanks!

I added txt and .panic support to the forum. So attach a support file and you can add the panic logs.

I do not know what is wrong, I have not seen this behavior. It may be a hardware issue, maybe the support file will help.

Here it is (I can't see an attachment):

Just in case (all 3 panic logs in one TXT file):

Clarification: ThunderBay 4 is new which I received from OWC earlier this week.

As a public service announcement to everyone, DO NOT run 11.2 beta on your M1 machine or you won't have access to your SoftRAID volumes. At least that was my experience. Driver loaded fine. The SoftRAID app saw the RAID volume but the OS didn't see it. Disk Utility saw it as four individual volumes. I had a beta profile loaded and forgot about it, so it installed 11.2. I had to roll back to 11.1 to get everything running again.

@woodstocknick

This may be true. If so, we will have a new beta ASAP. I saw something tonight that may be this issue, with 11.2.

(or we will have a workaround posted)