More on Compaq Proliant install boot mystery

[David Nedrow]

OK, I'm starting from scratch now.

I have multiple Compaq DL360, 1850R, and 2500 servers with varying 
amounts of memory (minimum is one 2500 with 128M) and CPU 
configurations, from single 200MHz pentiums to dual 1GHz pentiums.

The one thing these boxes all have in common is that they have some 
variant of the Compaq SMART array controller. All hard drives on the 
systems are managed via the array controllers.

Note that the behavior I'm describing occurs identically under FC1, 
FC2, and FC3T1.

Simply booting the Fedora installation makes it to the point of telling 
me I don't have enough memory for the installation. Fine, I've run into 
that before.

Booting the Fedora installation with "linux mem=128M" (test box in this 
case is a Proliant 2500 with SMART-2SL array controller and 128megs of 
RAM) yields a kernel panic, advising that I provide a proper "root=" 
parameter to the kernel. I suspect strongly that in this case, the 
cpqarray driver is never being loaded.

Seeing some other similar complaints and solutions, I tried 
exactmapping of memory. The kernel statement I provided are:

mem=exactmap mem=640K at 0 mem=127M at 1M

mem=exactmap mem=640K at 0 mem=15M at 1M mem=122M at 16M

mem=exactmap mem=640K at 0 mem=15M at 1M mem=48M at 16M mem=64M at 64M

The last one uses memory locations I got via SmartStart (Compaq's 
configuration tool for Proliant servers).

Anytime I provide the mem=exactmap parameters, the boot hangs 
immediately after "Uncompressing Linux... OK, booting the kernel".

Has ANYONE installed FC* on a Compaq Proliant with all drives managed 
by a SMART array controller? I really think something is funky in the 
initrd image. Maybe a bad module map, or funky EISA support, something 
like that.

I did manage to get one machine installed, but only by creating a 
custom kernel for the installer and then running mkinitrd from a 
chroot'd rescue to get the system to boot the default installed kernel.

-David