FC2T3 - Adaptec RAID ques

[-=Brian Truter=-]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: fedora-test-list-bounces at redhat.com 
> [mailto:fedora-test-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of 
> Warren Togami
> Sent: Thursday, April 29, 2004 10:13 PM
> To: For testers of Fedora Core development releases
> Subject: Re: FC2T3 - Adaptec RAID ques
> 
> Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 04:28:02PM -0500, -=Brian Truter=- wrote:
> > 
> >>The Adaptec 2100S RAID card was supported inherantly in FC1. 
> >>FC2T3 does not seem to detect it. It does probe and load 
> the I2O_block 
> >>and I2O_core modules, but the installer fails saying it 
> cannot find a 
> >>hard drive.
> 
> You have more than one logical block device right?  
> Unfortunately it was discovered after Test3's kernel froze 
> that using more than one block device, the i2o_block driver 
> would corrupt kernel memory, oops or panic depending on the 
> situation.  These problems have since been seemingly 
> completely fixed by Markus Lidel's efforts, and I really hope 
> we can incorporate these changes in the FC2 final kernel.  
> (Read the bottom of this message for the latest status of 
> this driver development.)
> 
> The 2.4 kernel series had the dpt_i2o driver maintained by Adaptec. 
> Unfortunately they chose to not prepare the driver for the 
> 2.6 kernel, and as a result these owners were locked out of 
> 2.6 for a while.  There is some ongoing development toward 
> fixing the dpt_i2o driver, however it is unclear to me 
> whether it is fully stable.  The old 2.4 dpt_i2o driver
>   never did work on 64bit archs.
> 
> The generic I2O layer originally written by Alan Cox was 
> unusable and broken in various ways in 2.6 until Markus Lidel 
> began hacking at it. 
> He began with his personal x86 32bit box, then my x86-64 dual 
> Opteron server.  Due to his efforts, for the first time I am 
> able to use the 2.6 kernel and 64bit kernel with my Adaptec 
> 2110S RAID card.
> 
> The one thing you have to watch out for however is that the 
> /dev nodes are different when using the generic I2O layer.  
> Rather than having /dev/sdX devices, they are used as /dev/i2o/hdX.
> 
> > 
> > 
> > See the release notes. There are still several problems with 
> > dpt/adaptec stuff and i2o right now across 2.6 as a whole.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I wrote the below status report about I2O driver development 
> a few hours ago.
> 
> Markus has just posted five I2O patches to LKML.  We have 
> extensively tested that combination of I2O changes to be 
> stable for both x86 and
> x86-64 (Dual Opteron on Tyan 2880S).  For this reason it 
> should be safe to include and should not pose added risk to 
> other kernel subsystems.
> 
> Additionally the raidutils is able to work for the first time 
> on both 32bit and 64bit kernels when the passthru patch is 
> added.  This patch was the only portion criticized on 
> linux-scsi mailing list, but after further research Markus 
> believes that it is impossible to use the generic SCSI 
> passthru to achieve the same result.  This is because 
> i2o_config uses a char device, while the generic SCSI uses 
> block devices.
> 
> List of Improvements over Upstream:
> * No longer corrupts kernel memory/oops/panic when there is 
> more than one logical block device.
> * i2o_scsi now uses the i2o_context_list_*() functions for 
> transaction context, and therefore now work on 64-bit systems too
> * Stable operation tested up to four block devices with heavy 
> I/O simultaneously. (bonnie++)
> * Loads and unloads kernel modules cleanly.
> * i2o-makefile-cleanup.patch
> The Kconfig and Makefile in drivers/message/i2o have a 
> CONFIG_I2O_PCI entry, which has been replaced by 
> CONFIG_I2O_CONFIG for the i2o_config module.
> 
> TODO:
> * Optimize for 64bit DMA addressing when available.
> * Change i2o_config to use generic SCSI passthru after it is 
> implemented upstream.
> 
> http://i2o.shadowconnect.com/
> More information and all patches are available here.
> 
> Warren Togami
> wtogami at redhat.com
> 
> 
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> 

Hi Warren, thanks for your reply. From investigating this issue, I have
found that "You are the man" when it comes to the Adaptec issues, haha.

Right now, there is only 1 HD attached to the card. There is no RAID set up.
Later I planned to add a 2nd drive and mirror it, but I just wanted to
install and configure Test3 before I did that.

I2O_core and I2O_block are probed and are loaded, but for some reason,
Anaconda says there is no hard drive.