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Re: Woody on Proliant ML350 G3 (smartarray 641)



Peter Visser wrote:

On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 10:00, Markus Oswald wrote:
Am Mi, den 11.02.2004 schrieb Emmanuel Halbwachs um 20:12:
Hello everybody,

I've just suscribed to the list after discovering it recently. I'm
not strictly an ISP, but I provide various services for 150-200 users.

I would like to run woody on HP Compaq Proliant ML350 G3 (no choice of
the model because of public market reasons). Before buying some
machines, I would like to check if woody can be installed
on. Actually, colleagues of mine own some (running FreeBSD) and
proposed me to try to install woody on one box. The hardware is :

  raid controller : smartarray 641
  ethernet NIC : BCM5702 (subsystem : NC7760)

This will be my first woody install on raid hardware, so I'm
inexperienced.

Colleagues told me that woody install fails due to "old" kernel
2.4.18-bf24 which doesn't include recent modules for the raid (cciss)
and the NIC (tg3 seems better than bcm5700). I've searched the list
archive but I didn't really find an answer.
As of kernel 2.4.23/4 i have been getting some problems with the bcm5700
driver (card's not detected and other things) so i would recommend using
the tg3 drivers.

I don't know for sure about the RAID controller [1] but to get the NIC
in a ProLiant DL380G3 (a BMC57xx too) working I compiled the driver from
Broadcom against a 2.4.18-bf24 source. This way I get modules which can
be used with the woody bf24 kernel so I can setup the system and
download a newer kernel to the system. Beginning with 2.4.19 you can use
the tg3.o module supplied by the kernel...

You can grab the compiled modules from my repository
(http://people.iirc.at/moswald/linux/bf24_modules/bcm5700/) or the
source directly from Broadcom (http://www.broadcom.com/drivers/)

[1] It may work with the cciss module just as the SmartArray 5i does -
Please note that with the standard Debian 3.0 cd the SmartArray only
works in single channel mode. If you use a dual channel config you will
get a error like 'can't get controller into duplex mode'. I don't know
if this if also true for the 641, but since it uses the same driver i
think it is.

Another thing with the DL380G3 (and maybe also the ML350) is that the
(raid) performance is very disappointing. This might have something todo
with hyperthreading / SMP. But i am not sure. I have tested with a
single CPU and in some cases the performance was (much) better.
There are older threads in this mailing list about poor raid performance with SMP and > 1 gig ram, try reducing your ram to 1 or 2 gig, and browse the archives for more information on how to really fix it.

//Pierre

but I read somewhere about a bug in the driver which wasn't fixed until
2.4.21.

best regards,
 Markus
--
Markus Oswald <moswald@iirc.at>  \ Unix and Network Administration
Graz, AUSTRIA                     \ High Availability / Cluster
Mobile: +43 676 6485415            \ System Consulting
Fax:    +43 316 428896              \ Web Development

Peter









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