Dell PE 2800 (with PERC 4) & kernel 2.6 workaround success
Hello list,
I thougth to share my experience with Dell PE 2800 with PERC 4 (LSI
based) raid controller. Not sure this is right list but here goes anyway:
- Installed Sarge with netinst (dated 13.3.2005), had to use 2.4 kernel since
d-i kernel 2.6.8 would not recognise PERC 4 controller (new megaraid driver is
included in kernel 2.6.9, i think)
- To get 2.6 kernel had to mix system with sid packages (2.6.10 kernel-image for
em64t-p4 system)
- Installing 2.6 kernel-image produced initrd which tried to load megaraid2
module, instead of megaraid_mbox, so put /etc/modprobe.d/aliases line:
alias megaraid2 megaraid_mbox
After reinstalling kernel-image 2.6.10, server was up and running.
- On boot machine would stop on setting real time clock, could get over this by
ctrl+c. Workaround for this copied /sbin/hwclock to /sbin/hwclock.bin and put in
script /sbin/hwclock:
#! /bin/sh
/sbin/hwclock.bin --directisa $*
According to man page and few people --directisa should not have any effect
other than ISA and Alpha machine, but it did help to set and get rtc values.
And one other thing, had to boot to 2.4 kernel to install 2.6.10 smp kernel,
tried it in 2.6.10 non-smp kernel but could not get it installed. (cpio error
and yes i did upgrade e2fsprogs to newest (sid) version but after that both
megaraid2 and megaraid_mbox were missing from initrd image loadmodule list (and
cpio error was still there, something to do with 64/32-bit libs i think
(actually i read it ;)) so
machine would not boot since raid controller was not recognised.
To get/set rtc someone succested to unload rtc module and load genrtc instead,
did not try that, though.
So now i have Dell PE 2800 Sarge/Sid system up and running with 2.6.10
em64t-p4-smp kernel, have to test it a lot before putting it to production,
though. Maybe even try Ubuntu Hoary amd64 preview release before that to get
64-bit userland as well ;-)
All this required few days of googling and browsing mailinglists, which did
mention problems with Dell PE & (mainly) PERC 4 on 2.6 kernel, so picked up bits
and pieces here and there to get this workaroud.
Hopefully this will help someone!
ms
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