dmraid adventures and 'challenges'

Chris Chabot chabotc at xs4all.nl
Sat Aug 5 13:28:55 UTC 2006


Hi Guys,

I was wondering if someone was going thru the same dmraid 'challenges' 
as me and had figured out a solution to boot the recent (-25xx) kernels, 
since i now seem to be unable too (again)

First some historical background.. I've gotten a Dell XPS600 system 
about 6 months ago, it comes with all kinds of goodnesses, including 
2x250gb serial ata disks in 'hardware assisted' raid0 mode, specifically 
with a a nVidia Intel SLI motherboard and its "nVidia Corporation CK804" 
serial ata controller / raid.

Before Fedora Core 4.9x, it was impossible to run linux on this machine 
since the raid set was not supported but then in the Fedora Core 4.9x 
(fc5 test 1 and 2) releases it worked just fine .. no sweat.. insert cd, 
sometimes fiddle with configs a little bit, and i was up and running! 
Also FC5 seemed to work great out of the box (2054 kernel), sometimes i 
hit some great glitches of not booting because of the 'dm-striped device 
sizes must be a multiple of chunk-size for 2.6.16 kernels' bug (well 
some call it a feature :-)), for a while i was forced to run older 
kernels until i figured out how to fix it thru some magical dmsetup and 
friends commands

Then came FC5 updates, and the updated kernels didn't work on my dmraid 
set .. Turned out some of my problems were caused by the init script in 
the initrd images, which wasn't adding the 'dmraid setup' commands, ergo 
no root disks, no linux :-)

And for a while now, all the way upto the 2.6.17 24xx kernels, i've been 
able to update my kernels by gunzipping / cpio'ing / editing the init 
script / packaging it back up into a new initrd.img file ..

However since a week or so (maybe 2 ? i'm not sure), this trick didn't 
work anymore .. the good news was that the dmraid setup commands were 
now automaticly included in the init script again, however despite their 
presence at boot i am now supprised by no error reports, until the 
'could not mount the root device' comes up and tells me that this 
attempt was an utter failure.

I've diffed the init scripts from my working booting kernel (which is 
2.6.17-1.2364 for some obscure historical but unknown to me reason) and 
the one in 2517, and there were no differences, so everything should 
work right! :-)

Anyone been having the same problems and been able to figure out what 
now is making booting impossible? I'd be positively delighted to learn 
how to fix it again :-)

Kindest Regards,

    -- Chris Chabot




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