Re: ServeRAID M5110e driver for Debian Squeeze
CC'ing back to debian-users
On 10/25/2012 1:50 AM, s0lid wrote:
>>
>> I just read the specs on the System x3650 M4 (sorry I din previously)
>> and it has the m5110e integrated on the mobo, and AFAICT no other
>> SAS/SATA ASIC. Thus the method I described for getting Debian and a
>> mainline kernel installed isn't going to work without some additional
>> hardware. VMWare vShpere (ESX) is supported, so if you go virtual
>> Debian works without these hassles.
>>
>> Short of that, you'll need to create your own Debian installer using a
>> late mainline kernel or find one someone else has already created, or...
>>
>> Install a bootable PCIe SSD in each box, install Debian to it, then copy
>> over and install the late mainline kernel you built and verified to work
>> on the guinea pig box. The mainline build scripts create a .deb target
>> when built on a Debian host, so the resulting kernel package can be
>> copied to and installed on any Debian system with little effort. I do
>> this twice a year when I build my custom kernels.
>>
>> The easiest (for you) solution is to get the Debian kernel team to
>> acquire the driver source and build it into the Squeeze/Wheezy kernels,
>> or release it as a standalone installable module. That's not going to
>> happen any time soon.
>>
>>
>> In closing, I'll remind all Debian users to never assume that Debian
>> will work, bare metal, with any box or hardware they acquire, especially
>> very new enterprise servers from the big 5 vendors. There is a reason,
>> many actually, that the spec sheets on this gear, across the board, list
>> only the two commercial Linux vendors and none of the community Linux
>> Distros. Community support for enterprise servers isn't even "best
>> effort", but more like "if/when we get to it".
>
> I was wrong. The http://kmuto.jp/debian/d-i did work! I removed the
> Virtual drives and forgot to re-initialized it again >:(. Now i set
> the drives to Raid 10 and kmuto's custom installer works! Im using
That's good news.
> kernel 3.2 but not sure with the stability of it. Anyone tried this
> kernel on production?
I've been using vanilla 3.2.6 on my SOHO box for 238 days without
issues. Worth noting is that the hardware is quite different and much
older than yours.
As always, run every new server through its paces and beat on it
thoroughly to surface any problems before going into production. This
is true even when your OS of choice installs without a hitch. Nobody
wants to discover flaky hardware or kernel software a month after going
into production, when the box first sees a perfect storm of high CPU,
mem, net, and disk load.
In the US Navy they call this "sea trials" or a "shakedown cruise":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_trial
--
Stan
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