Topic: sme on geforce8100/720a

[cirkit]

With the advent of new chipsets we get better integrated features, lower power consumption, and better performance, the geforce8100/720a from nvidia is a fairly new entrant with 6 sata ports for AMD processors, the boards are priced at 50$ and has brilliant performance on windows platform. hence I decided to give sme 7.4 a try but sme failed to detect any harddisks, sme loads the ahci driver, nv_sata driver but still fails to detect the harddisk (i tried all three hdd modes SATA-IDE, AHCI & RAID). Any suggestions on how to load SME7.4 on this mother board (biostar GF8100 M2+ TE)

[marsa_matruh]

Did you tried to install the corresponding CentOs version? (4.7 I think)

[cirkit]

I went on the centos forums ver 5.3 there were many posts of people using geforce8300/720a

[Stefano]

I went on the centos forums ver 5.3 there were many posts of people using geforce8300/720a

yes, but SME 7.4 is not based on Centos 5..

try to install Centos 4.7, but I'm pretty sure you'll get the same problems..

Ciao
Stefano

[cirkit]

can I not load drivers through external source by initiating installation using sme dd (please let me know from where to download and how to prepare driver disk, i downloaded driver disk from nvidia site for rhel5 but that did not work). Any workaround will be highly appreciated.

[janet]

cirkit

You would be better off to use sme 8 beta4 with that motherboard, as you will save yourself lot's of problems now and avoid upgrade problems later too, with regard to the patched drivers.

[cactus]

cirkit

You would be better off to use sme 8 beta4 with that motherboard, as you will save yourself lot's of problems now and avoid upgrade problems later too, with regard to the patched drivers.

But the upgrade path from x.ybeta to any stable release for SME Server is also not something that you can be sure of as this is outside the scope of the development team.

[janet]

cactus

Doing a backup of sme8 betaX and a restore to the sme8 final wil probably be less trouble than repeatedly maintaining drivers.

[cirkit]

I am definately giving sme8beta4 a try today it self, then too any well documented method to make sme7.4 work on this chipset (technically it is called MCP78S by nvidia).

[Stefano]

then too any well documented method to make sme7.4 work on this chipset (technically it is called MCP78S by nvidia).

I think that this chipset will not be supported by RH/CentOS 4.x

ciao
Stefano

[cirkit]

I stayed awake the whole night downloaded SME8.0BETA4, On commencing installtion the screen stuck for three minutes on "loading ahci driver" and then proceded to answer "no devices to install found", I then quickly went to the CentOS 5.3 forums to find people where sucessfull in installing only after issuing "pci=nomsi" at boot, what is this option? After "pci=nomsi" the ahci driver loaded immediately and the installer could detect the harddisk well and installtion proceeded normally, it took 6mins30secs against 3min10sec on sme 7.4 with nvidia MCP68 (the previous generation chipset), On configuring the server I again hit a hurdle, during INIT initialising eth0 it said" failed to find nvidia eth0 [FAILED], why does'nt it detect the on board Nvidia ethetnet controller with realtek rtl 8101 PHY. Finally I installed an Intel pro 10/100/1000 PCI Lan card and it immediately functioned. My OBSERVATIONS: Using "pci=nomsi" detected the sata controller and the harddisk but did not detect the Ethernet controller. The overall speed of data transfer while installation was slower tha SME7.4 on MCP68 (earlier chipset: whoose sata & ethernet are both automatically detected by SME). suggestions to make the on-board ethetnet controller are urgently required and why does the kernel not detect the Chipset straight away?

[cactus]

Doing a backup of sme betaX and a restore to the sme8 final wil probably be less trouble than repeatedly maintaining drivers.

True, but the designers do not guarantee (flawless) upgrades from beta to stable, they most likely will do from RC to stable.

[cactus]

suggestions to make the on-board ethetnet controller are urgently required and why does the kernel not detect the Chipset straight away?

The only suggestion you most likely would like to hear is compiling your own drivers, but this needs a controlled build envionment and a lot of effort as you would need to build for every new kernel release. As time is money you are best of to find main board that is supported and connect your hardware to that and then install SME Server. Your current setup will contnue to haunt you in the future.

Take my advice, have a look at the RHEL supported hardware list and stick to it when buying hardware. Most of the times you need servers up, without to much attending and taking care, SME Server is such a product, but since the resources are very scarce the development team is strictly adhering to CentOS/RHEL on the hardware support issue. By Buying supported hardware you will have not to spend too much tme to your SME Server, which will be just doing its job.

[cirkit]

Thanks cactus. I am a pro AMD person hence I try to test as much AMD main boards as possible on SME. Nvidia and AMD (ATI) chipset mainboards are freely available. Performance wise they outperform most Intel chipsets. I would like to know whether the newer amd chipsets like 760G, 780G 790GX with south bridge sb700 sb710 and sb750 will be supported in ver 8 of SME (I could not find any info on the above chipsets on RHEL website)

[cactus]

Thanks cactus. I am a pro AMD person hence I try to test as much AMD main boards as possible on SME. Nvidia and AMD (ATI) chipset mainboards are freely available. Performance wise they outperform most Intel chipsets. I would like to know whether the newer amd chipsets like 760G, 780G 790GX with south bridge sb700 sb710 and sb750 will be supported in ver 8 of SME (I could not find any info on the above chipsets on RHEL website)

Unless they are supported in RHEL and CentOS (as CentOS is based on RHEL, SME Server in turn is based on CentOS) SME Server will not support them. If you want support for AMD hardware you need to have to go for incorporating them in RHEL (or perhaps CentOS). I know a lot of newer AMD hardware is not (fully) supported, I also have a state of the art motherboard that is not fully supported by the latest CentOS release.

AFAIAC CPU speed is not really that important for a server IMHO...

[Stefano]

I am a pro AMD person hence I try to test as much AMD main boards as possible on SME. Nvidia and AMD (ATI) chipset mainboards are freely available.

I would write  to AMD asking them to work with kernel's devs

even if AMD releases drivers source code, compiling them every time is a pain

my 2c
Stefano

[janet]

cactus

True, but the designers do not guarantee (flawless) upgrades from beta to stable

Upgrade is not supported, but a backup & restore is OK to do as it's essentially data & config only