Fedora support for SCSI RAID Cards.

[dsavage at peaknet.net]

On Tueesday August 24, 2004 at 2:10 p.m. "Ray Van Dolson"
<rayvd at digitalpath.net> wrote:
> I'm looking at purchasing an Adaptec 2100S SCSI RAID card.  The RAID array
> on
> this device will be the only drives in the system, so the Fedora
> installation CD
> needs to be able to recognize it, install to it and summarily boot to it.
>
> Anyone know if support for the card is built in by default?  I've seen
> posts saying that it is not, and also come across a custom I2O boot disk
> for Red
> Hat 7.x.  All this is leading me to question whether or not I should
> purchase
> this card if I want a hassle-free install.
>
> Anyone have any experience with it?
>
> If it's _not_ a great card, anyone have any recommendations for a 32-bit
> PCI
> SCSI RAID controller with excellent Linux support?  I suppose I will look
> at AMI
> MegaRAID cards just in case.

Ray,

I'm using an Adaptec 2000S, the U160 version of your zero channel RAID
(ZCR) card, on a Tyan S2468UGN dual Athlon motherboard. It converts my two
on-board Symbios 53C1010-33 channels to any particular hardware RAID type
I want. It's currently driving an 18G OS drive and nine 146.8G 10,000 RPM
drives in a 1.1T RAID5 array.  My U160 version is very fast right out of
the box with no custom tuning.

The problem is...  The new SCSI framework in 2.6 kernels required a
complete re-write of all SCSI drivers. Some, including the I2O drivers,
didn't make it into FC2 or FC3t1. There's a work-around for some that
works, but not for any of the ZCR cards.

With FC1 being sundowned next month, and RH9 close to (if not at) EOL, I
found myself in a situation where my only viable long term choice was
RHEL3. Based on the older 2.4 kernel and SCSI architecture, its dpt_i2o
driver works very well with ZCR cards.

If you can hold your breath, FC3t2 could be released in about three weeks,
and with any luck they'll have the new i2o_proc driver sorted out and
ready for testing.

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL