Topic: 3ware 7410 and sme5 installation

[aniston]

Anyone tried the installation of the 3ware 7410 RAID controller under sme V5 ?

I cannot get the installation CD to see the disks. Looking thru the posts i found articles related to recompling the kernel with support for this card. The mother board is quite standard Asus A7v without the Promise raid onboard.

Or any help or indication regarding recompiling or adding module support durning installation time for the sme server V5 to see the 3ware 7410 RAID card is gratefully appreciated.

thanks in advance.

aniston.

[Tom Keiser]

This board works just fine with e-smith v.4.1.2, but there *MAY* be a problem with SME 5, which uses a completely non-standard kernel (non-standard vis-a-vis available drivers). Although SME5 is called RedHat 7.1, the RH7.1 drivers won't work, because RH7.1 actually uses kernel 2.4.2, while SME5 uses 2.2.19.

The Asus A7V should not be any part of the problem. You might have to get really fancy with SME5 (compile drivers from source and make your own install script) or install to a regular ide or scsi drive, then see if you can mount the 3ware card to hold the i-bays.

I once wrote a little how-to for adding raid controllers from Adaptec or Promise (online at the Mitel site) but these vendors  do not publish source code, and none of their drivers are for 2.2.19 so my how-to won't work for SME5.

[aniston]

Hello Tom Keiser ,

I tried the e-smith v.4.1.2 and the 3ware iRAID 7410 card with 2 drives of 20 Gb which showed up well inside the 3ware's BIOS screen and then configured them for RAID 1 and rebooted but still even with v4.1.2 it still cannot see the drives ! and exits from the installation with the error message  - no valid devices were found on which to create new filesystems.

when i tried the most simplest installation of RH 7.1 with the driver version provided by 3ware for RH 71 it worked in the first shot and could see and partition the drives very well. So definately the board is working under Linux (RH 71) and Asus A7v and 3ware and the quantum disc drives.

Any other suggestions?

regards,
aniston.

[aniston]

Tom ::

thanks for that idea of mounting the 3ware card in RAID to reflect an i-bay and hence keep the user files there. But that changes my whole strategy where i need the client to run all day without the fear of having a lot of downtime in the event of a disk failure.

inanycase i will mount a atandard redhat 7.1 distro on the same machine config and then try to get a kernel module similar to the esmith setup configured so as to get the card to be reconized durning boot time and hence get on with the installation.

if someone could indicate or suggest some guidelines on adding the 3ware modules to the existing kernel in a way that i could create a boot floopy disk and get the disk and card reconized durning install time!.

will post my results on both versions essg v4.1.2 and sme v5 if i do succeed.

aniston.

[Ed Form]

Doesn't the AxonLinux development from E-Smith use an up-to-date kernel? It seems to add a number of other useful things, but the bit you need seems to be a mainstream kernel number.

Ed Form

[aniston]

ED :

thats what I thought too , and so i tried out the axon linux but still no chance of see this controller. It seems like the kernel module drivers are not present in any of the distros.

By the way i tried killing the contents of the ks.cfg script and was hoping it would let me install the e-smith server by asking me for a driver diskette just like the redhat 7.1 system does .... it did not !

im trying to find a simple way out of this rather than compiling the module support for the 3ware cards !!

...aniston.

[Shad]

Try typing "accept dd" at the initial prompt.  From what I understand this should allow you to put the driver disk in.  It has worked for some.

-Shad

[aniston]

Thanks Shad,

the "accept dd" worked fine and even after the reboot i did not have to do any modifications. Last question is about hdparm which gave an error saying ...

read() hit DOF - device too small

any ideas !

thanks again,
aniston.

[aniston]

oops ::

wrt hdparm and the 3ware 7410 card with RAID 1 and a fresh install of SME v5. I made a mistake checking the transfer timings of the disks, the hdparm had to be done with  ...

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

instead of /dev/hda as the 3ware cards are treated as SCSI

for anyone folowing this thread upto here the installation of a fresh SME v5 was carried out very simply and smoothly by just typing

accept dd

at the boot prompt of the installation.
You must however have the driver disk ready of the 3Ware 7410 or 3ware 6000 or 7000 series with these files on it
1. 3w-xxxx.bot
2. 3w-xxxx.o
3. 3w-xxxx.smp
these files are available on the 3ware website at
also it is a good idea to upgarde the firmware of the card first.

... and now for some test results with the disks in RAID 1 mirror

3ware 7410 with 2 Maxtor D740x-6L ATA 100 20Gb drives on port 0 and 1
Asus A7V with a Duron 700 Mhz and 512MB PC133 SDRAM

hdparm -Tt /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.68 seconds =188.24 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.61 seconds = 39.75 MB/sec

and the system running the same SME v5 with just the disks on seperate channels of the onboard controller and s/w RAID 1 mirroring gave us this.

 hdparm -Tt /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  1.30 seconds = 102.46 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.89 seconds = 34.86 MB/sec

- to conclude i think the major advantage will be when all 4 disks are in use (or 8 in the case of the 7810 card) or when a PCI bus with a 64 bit slot is used. however the controller does do a massive buffer transfer with good speeds of 180MB/sec and above this is where the switch will really come in when there is more disks.

regards to all for their help.
aniston.

[Shad]

Not bad.  I didn't know about the timing aspect of hdparm.  I have the 6800 with 5 drives (Maxtor 96147H8 60Gb) in a RAID5 array and these are my timings.

/dev/sdb:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  1.12 seconds =114.29 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.52 seconds = 25.40 MB/sec

to compare I also have an onboard scsi drive (Quantum Atlas 10k 18Gb) as the single boot drive and swap drive.  Its timings are such.

/dev/sda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  1.17 seconds =109.40 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.60 seconds = 24.62 MB/sec

I did have a time of it trying to get SME 5 installed on just the first drive.  Appears that it wants to use all drives in the system instead of just the first drive it finds.  (I consider this a bug).  But once I got that going then I got the second drive mounted on /home/e-smith.

I like this because most of the system stuff is now very fast and I have a RAID backup of the user/ibay data areas.

-Shad

[Julian Weber]

I apologize if this is off the thread but I am trying to do something similar and was hoping one of you guys would know.  I am trying to install sme5 on a server with a Mylex DAC960 raid controller.  It makes it through the lilo prompt and boot sequence but hangs when it tries to load an NCR SCSI driver.  I tried making the driver disk but it doesn't seem to ask for a driver before it tries the NCR one and hangs. Can I force it not to try the NCR driver?

Julian

[jose velez]

The SME 5.1 beta 1 thru 3 supports the Mylex card and install in a few minutes (very fast).  I requested Darrell Mays for the driver and he found that 5.1 had support for it.