Topic: rebuild kernel SME 7

[btech]

Hi Everyone -

How do I get the SME 7 kernel sources on to my installation so that I can add drivers and recompile the kernel?  I read that they are simply Red Hat somewhere - if that is true, where do I find the Red Hat kernel that correspnds to SME server?

Thanks,
Jeff

[guest22]

A simple search through the forums would result is several hits, where the first one would be:

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=27614.0

guest

[btech]

That helps, but only some.  Actually I spent about 45 minutes searching for information on this subject earlier, and everything I found was similarly obtuse.

Trying to peice the mystery together, it appears that something called "devtools" is necessary, and the version appears to be 7.

Another thing I read said that the kernel source was flat out red-hat, and that the red-hat kernel source should be used.  The link you mention seems to refute this.

So I can either use an untested script that someone has put together, or another script from some unknown source for "yum" to get the source code put in some unknown location.  Is that about the long and short of it?

Thanks,
Jeff

[btech]

I wanted to recompile the kernel to fix performance on an IDE drive that would not do DMA, but I still have a problem with the hard drive not functioning on an nvidia nforce 4 (neither SATA nor IDE work - I get Journal I/O commit errors every night followed by a system hang).  I thought the I/O error had been resolved, but it has not, so I think I will simply move on to FreeBSD 6, which I use for most of my production systems anyway.

Thanks,
Jeff

[CharlieBrady]

I wanted to recompile the kernel to fix performance on an IDE drive that would not do DMA...

That's rather ambitious of you. Do you know what the problem is? Have you reported the issues you've seen to redHat's bugzilla? They'd certainly be interested if you know of kernel bugs which cause poor performance.

[gordonr]

Another thing I read said that the kernel source was flat out red-hat, and that the red-hat kernel source should be used.  The link you mention seems to refute this.

The kernel is straight RHEL, rebuilt by the centos.org team from the RHEL kernel sources. To build binary packages such as the kernel you need a build server, and the best advice there is a CentOS 4.2 development server install. The SME Server does not include compilers and development tools.

I haven't used or tested the development tools installation script linked here, and I don't recommend it - build servers and production servers are different things.

Anyway, I agree with Charlie - if there is a kernel performance issue, it should be in RedHat's Bugzilla.

[btech]

OK - thanks for the input.  I will make an entry there.  One question: where should I, exactly, enter this bug?  Red Hat Enterprise Linux v4, Fedora Core, etc?  The Red Hat Bugzilla is very specific about bug entry location - which kernel is SME Server using, exactly?

This is not just a performance issue, though, but a flat out driver failure issue.  As I mentioned (in another thread), the 939NF4G board (NForce 410 chipset) has repeated Journal I/O Errors, resulting in repeated locks, which happen at least once every night.

This is true with SATA drives or IDE drives.  I did a significant amount of re-configuring in BIOS with no effect.  The ONLY thing I didn't try (consistently) was disablig ACPI, which may help this if anyone else runs into it.  I know ACPI is often a cause of problems, but I ran out of time to test it "off" completely.

I also realized late in the game that the install was not available in 64 bit, which is somewhat minor but still a bit of an annoyance, since I am moving all my production systems (and client systems) to AMD 64.

SME Server is running great on another somewhat older (non-64 bit - A7N8X board) system I have, so I know it's a good OS for a highly "auto" configured system.

Thanks,
Jeff

[electroman00]

Hi all

I think the question here is still....

What does it take to turn SME7 into a DEV platform??

The way I understand it now is, you need 3 systems to DEV.

1 Centos dev

2 SME dev...to test Centos dev stuff

3 SME production

Would be nice to have the later two only.

Seems there would, from all angles, be some benefits gleamed from a SME7 DEV system.

Energy cost savings for one.

Expedited SME7 contribution developement.

[CharlieBrady]

OK - thanks for the input.  I will make an entry there.  One question: where should I, exactly, enter this bug?  Red Hat Enterprise Linux v4, Fedora Core, etc?  The Red Hat Bugzilla is very specific about bug entry location - which kernel is SME Server using, exactly?

"The kernel is straight RHEL"

"rpm -qiv kernel" will give you more detail. And "rpm -q --changelog kernel" will give you much, much more.

[gordonr]

What does it take to turn SME7 into a DEV platform??

See the dev guide (linked from the Development page).

For programs which don't require compilation, you don't need anything other than an SME Server (with the usual proviso about keeping development separate from production).

For compiled programs, you need a CentOS 4.2 development server and need to add e-smith-devtools.

[gordonr]

(quoting me) "The kernel is straight RHEL"

And for those not familliar with it, this  stands for RedHat Enterprise Linux. CentOS 4.2 is RHEL 4, update 2. RedHat are very particular about the use of the trademarked term 'RedHat'.