[K12OSN] Hostraid and ltsp 4.0.1
Robert Arkiletian
robark at telus.net
Wed Oct 6 01:40:15 UTC 2004
Mark Gumprecht wrote:
> I have a intel server board SE7501HG2. Can the host raid be setup for
> the 4.0.1 release to get raid 0/1. Or do you have to select
> non-hostraid drivers? I've looked at intel and adaptecs' website and
> they say only up to rh9 is supported. Is it possible to have a
> hardware raid on this mobo or not?
> TIA
> Mark
>
I got this board as part of my system for my school. It has been
excellent. It has an excellent Adaptec SCSI controller on board
(aic7902). However, Linux does NOT support Host Raid. Host raid is
actually software raid for Windows (ITS NOT HARDWARE RAID). There are
drivers for Windows to make it work but not for Linux. However, the
linux kernel will support software raid using LVM, which is just as fast
as some hardware raid setups. (Although I have not tried it, I know it's
done when you setup your partitions) The beautiful aspect of this MB is
that is has TWO scsi channels. So you can even have the full throughput
of each channel and raid them through the kernel. All I did was use one
scsi drive for / and another for /home. I have not tried raid. I'm using
k12ltsp 3.1.2 (redhat 9) and not 4.0.1 (FC1) because I need stable SMP
kernel with 2 Xeons. However, 4.1 (FC2) is supposed to be stable with
SMP kernel. BTW my system is even stable with bigmem smp kernel although
I've only got 4GB ram. So if I ever have to upgrade to 6GB and run 2
labs of 30 off the one server I could do it. That's the other nice
feature of this MB it's got 6 memory slots.
A couple of notes. You MUST disable HostRaid in the bios for the
controller to work with Linux. Also, I down graded each scsi channel to
160 mb/s instead of 320 mb/s. The system was not fully stable at 320mb/s
because of scsi driver issues. Don't worry though a new 10k rpm scsi
drive only needs around 60 mb/s bandwidth. So you should be okay for
about 3 drives/channel at full throttle for all of them (highly
unlikely). I don't think you will ever need more than 6 scsi drives for
k12ltsp. The driver for the kernel is written by Justin Gibbs. He had
some issues/disagreements with James Bottomley (kernel maintainer) and
Linus Torvalds. So he pulled the drivers before version 2.0.x from his
site. The 2.6 series kernel has adaptec scsi aic79xx driver 1.3.x in it.
But if you go with k12ltsp 4.0.1 (FC1 & kernel 2.4.22) or earlier you
will have to use a driver update disk (DUD) from here
http://people.freebsd.org/~gibbs/linux/
This disk has to be made with dd and must be used during installation of
the OS in Expert mode.
If you go with k12ltsp 4.1 (FC2) , no worries, it has stable scsi
adaptec aic79xx driver 1.3.x built in since it comes with kernel 2.6.5
If I was you, I would go with k12ltsp 4.1 (FC2) from the beginning. It
will be the easiest for you. I did not have this option when I started.
Hope that helps
Good luck
BTW the drivers on adaptec/intel sites are very old (don't use them)
Robert Arkiletian
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