Re: 3ware 9550 SATA RAID controller problems

[Stephen Woodbridge <woodbri@swoodbridge.com>]

OK following this thread and the good advice from the thread:
   Re: no updates to amd64 stable in last 3 weeks?

I have to ask what is udev and what does it do for me?

Where/how do I get 2.6.15 that I can build for sarge and can someone 
walk me (a noobie) through the steps of building and installing it on 
sarge in the "Debian way", so that is is similar to

Linux carto 2.6.8-11-em64t-p4-smp #1 SMP Mon Oct 3 00:07:51 CEST 2005 
x86_64 GNU/Linux

but with the driver needed for the 3ware 9550 card. I say similar to the 
above because I have that working. While I don't mind wading through a 
bunch of questions in menuconfig, but concern is that I will not have a 
clue about what hardware is in my system or not.

I'm reading http://newbiedoc.sourceforge.net/system/kernel-pkg.html but 
it would really make me feel better if someone with experience outlined 
the critical steps.

For example, I have the 3ware linux driver source but I think from other 
reports, the 2.6.15 already supports the 3ware 9550 card, so maybe just 
taking the .config from 2.6.8-11 and starting with that, ahh how do I 
start with that? Do I still need to go through menuconfig?

While while I waiting on a response I will wing it and try to do 
something is I can find 2.6.15 somewhere.

-Steve

Andrew McMillan wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 20:39 -0500, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
>
> > Hi Again,
> >
> > After finally getting Sarge installed on my SuperMicro X6DHT-G 
> > motherboard system, I am having a problem recognizing the 3ware 9550 
> > SATA Raid Controller card. I have loaded the 3w-9xxx module but that is 
> > not getting me anywhere yet. This system boots from a separate SATA disk 
> > so the system is running, just without the 1.6TB raid array :(
> >
> > lspci is reporting:
> >
> > 0000:03:02.0 RAID bus controller: 3ware Inc: Unknown device 1003
> >
> > So, I think what needs to happen next is one or more of the following:
>
>
> You can get lspci to show the full and correct details if you run
> update-pciids.
>
>
> > 1) upgrade to the 2.6.12 kernel
> > 2) compile the updated vendor source for 3w-9xxx module on either
> >    2.6.8-11 or 2.6.12
> > 3) something simpler that I am missing.
> >
> > Ideally, I would like to use a stock kernel which was why I was thinking 
> > of getting 2.6.12 from etch otherwise I will need to try and figure out 
> > how to use the kernel-package system and long term maintenance becomes a 
> > bigger problem.
> >
> > Thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> We recently bought a system with a 3ware 9550 controller and found
> 2.6.12 was not recent enough.  We got it working with 2.6.15-rc6 in the
> end, and now that 2.6.15 is released we will upgrade it to a more stable
> release - fortunately the system using this machine is still under
> development.
>
> So I would heartily recommend coming to grips with kernel-package and
> building your own (hopefully simpler) kernel.
>
> When building with make-kpkg we generally don't use the .config from a
> Debian build as we can make it more hardware specific and so do not need
> the complexity of an initrd image for the build.  I find it's better to
> spend 20 minutes going through all the options in make menuconfig and
> specifying appropriate settings for your hardware.  Of course I have
> been doing that for more than ten years now, so I guess I'm not daunted
> by it... :-)
>
> Regards,
> 					Andrew McMillan.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Andrew @ Catalyst .Net .NZ  Ltd,  PO Box 11-053, Manners St,  Wellington
> WEB: http://catalyst.net.nz/            PHYS: Level 2, 150-154 Willis St
> DDI: +64(4)803-2201      MOB: +64(272)DEBIAN      OFFICE: +64(4)499-2267
>       Make things as simple as possible, but no simpler -- Einstein
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------