Re: Intel SR1325TP1-E on debian
On Wed, 25 Aug 2004, Gabriel Granger wrote:
> make use of SATA controller on this Mobo so that I could HW raid and
> have the benefit of larger and fasters disks.... I've had nothing but
> problems installing Debian it using Wood 2.4 Kernel and using Sarge 2.6
> kernel. In the end I had to use SuSE... but not only SuSE but the
> profession edition as that was all that was lying around in the office.
> The issues with Debian were I believe lack of support for the Intel
> chipset(Adaptec ICH5-R/S Serial ATA RAID) as SuSE managed to install
> fine.
The ICH5-R is the Intel southbridge, not ADAPTEC. Also, it has no hardware
RAID. The only possible advantage it might have over our usual md software
RAID is that it **might** allow for the ICH5-R itself duplicating the
writes, so that only half of the PCI bus BW is taken. I don't believe this
happens, so all you get is worse, slower, non-standard software RAID.
Debian will support the ICH5-R in SATA mode if your kernel does. I am not
entirely sure about the 2.6 series, it might be that 2.6.8.1 has it, but for
2.4 only kernel 2.4.28-pre1 has proper ICH5-R SATA support without
patching.
There is no patching available for 2.4.27, either -- get 2.4.28-pre1.
2.4.26 would need the libata patches from Jeff Garzik. The libata patches
have strong issues with the PATA part of the ICH5-R when SATA is enabled,
and in some hardware platforms, will cause an extremely high number of
interrupts. This has been mostly fixed in 2.4.28-pre1, by ditching the old
ata_piix driver :P
I just applied the 2.4.28-pre1 patch on top of Debian's latest
kernel-source-2.4.27, so that I get all the niceties such as the 2.5 IPSEC
stack, and it worked just fine.
> wanna try this unless I know it will work.... has anyone got a Intel
> SR1325TP1-E 1U server and using the SATA Raid under Debian.
Well, the ATA RAID driver + libata PATA+SATA (make Damn Sure to not enable
the old non-libata ata_piix driver) in *2.4.28-pre1* should do it. And
probably whatever is in the latest 2.6 -pre will do it as well, I suppose.
But you *really* should be ditching the ICH5-R "RAID", and using Linux
software RAID instead. It is faster, and far, far more intelligent, since
it sits close enough to the page cache to do some intelligent tricks.
The *fatest* two-disk software RAID solution won't work with the current
sarge install out of the box, AFAIK. Namely, using only one MD partition
(the entire disk -- the MD driver does not optimize things correctly when
there are more than one MD logical disk per physical disk), and LVM on top
of that, with all (including root and swap) sitting on top of LVM on top of
MD RAID1.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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