[Sticky] Big Sur on M1 machines and SoftRAID issues

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)

@nwind

Got it.

There is no debugger for the M1, but we will look at it, although we cannot debug it.

@nwind

It did not attach, but I have your text.

@softraid-support

Thank you. Let me know what you will find.

It's off for now.

@nwind

Can you attach the SoftRAID Tech support file again?  I cannot find it and need to put it with the crash logs.

@softraid-support

Do you mean this one:

 Now attachment feature works

@nwind

No a SoftRAID Technical support file from the utilities menu.

@softraid-support

Here it is:

@softraid-support

It doesn't crash when ThunderBay 4 is running, but I did not attempt to continue cloning. Volume is Unmounted by default, but accessible from finder.

@softraid-support

Here is the Log file as well:

I've spent 20 hours this week trying to get this to work and it simply won't no matter what I do with a fresh install of my M1 Mini on 11.1.

I did the basics of enabling kernel access via Recovery. I've authorized full disk access for SoftRAID.

I'm fairly sure it's the bogus x86 system-installed extensions causing the issue - arcMSR and PromiseSTEX. I followed the instructions here to remove those, and completed the Terminal process hitting return after each question. The two extensions remain in the /System/Library/Extensions folder after running the commands, clearing staging, etc.

When I go back to reinstall the SoftRAID driver, it appears as "Notarized: Yes, Loaded: No". Doing a terminal command to load the extension returns "Binary is for x86_64." This is confusing because I thought this version of the driver was specifically for ARM and not Intel. How is it installing itself as an Intel extension which I'm seeing in 

Any time I have my Thunderbay 4 RAID 10 or another 2-bay SoftRAID-managed RAID 10 connected, my Mini immediately panics and shuts down. This happens as long as the driver is "installed". 

The worst part is that I've already committed to selling my Intel Mac mini that this machine was replacing. It's a media server and both of my RAID-10 SoftRAID-managed devices are the ONLY thing this machine is supposed to be handling. So for all intents and purposes I bought a new computer that has now killed any way to serve digital content in my home. My other Mac is also a larger M1 Mini so I don't even have an Intel fallback to get my drives accessible. This is rotten.

@nwind

No need to attach the log, it is in the support file.

SoftRAID does not support APFS yet in the user interface correctly, the volume is mounted.

Perchance, is your volume encrypted? (you would have needed to erase it in Disk Utility as encrypted to do that)

All I can do at the moment is put this in our investivate pile, when the debugger for M1 is working.

@trappedintime

Is this a clean install from the internet, or from your old system ? it almost seems like a quarantine issue.

Are you OK with terminal.app?

Run this command:

sudo kextload -v 6 /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext

Post the output to this command in your response.

Also run this:

sudo xattr /Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext

see if there is any output at all (none is good)

last is

sudo xattr (drop the SoftRAID app in for the path)

Do you get this as quarantined, or blank?

@softraid-support

Volume is not encrypted. 
what can I do now to make it work?

Does it make sense to format it different than APFS?

I need it functional.