Humbled by the SC440 and SAS 5/iR controller on CentOS 5.1

Why isn't Dell's SAS Raid Storage Manger clueing me into whats wrong?

Let me back up and ask this: Since, the kernel is gratiously working a controller, are there not any generic commands that query the SAS subsystem to report back overall statuses of hard drives and raids? I'm not a kernel programmer, but I just can't understand why you put all the effort into writing a driver which natively works with the kernel, and linux doesn't give you a way to inspect the most basics of information other than the spartan:

# cat /proc/scsi/mptsas/0
ioc0: LSISAS1068, FwRev=000a3300h, Ports=1, MaxQ=286

So, last ditch effort, I updated the bios and firmware on the SC440 and SAS 5/iR controller, and reinstalled Dell's SAS Raid Storage Manger v2.16-01 for RHEL5. Still no luck - "No Storage Controller Found!".

Bryan Mclellan told me I need to make sure the mptctl module was loaded - he was right.

I added "modprobe mptctl" at bootup according to these instructions:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/sysadmin-guide/s1-kernel-modules-persistant.html

Now, not only does the Dell SSM (aka LSI's MSM) software sees the controller, also a nifty tool called mpt-status (http://www.drugphish.ch/~ratz/mpt-status/) works as well:

# ./mpt-status
ioc0 vol_id 0 type IM, 2 phy, 135 GB, state OPTIMAL, flags ENABLED
ioc0 phy 1 scsi_id 32 SEAGATE ST3146755SS T107, 136 GB, state ONLINE,
flags NONE
ioc0 phy 0 scsi_id 1 SEAGATE ST3146755SS T107, 136 GB, state ONLINE,
flags NONE

Now, IMHO, mpt-status is the kind of utility that should be a part of the
SAS subsytem commands and also give clues as to what drivers aren't loaded.
I'm not neccessarily looking to *control* every proprietary controller with
one utility, but at least be able to monitor the status of any controller
with on command across all manufactures. Imagine a different ls command for
Dell, HP, IBM, etc....