I have been researching this topic for quite some time, and would
appreciate any help that members of this list can give. I have a
Gigabyte GA-2CEWH motherboard, with dual Opteron 244 processors on
it. I can install FC4 and FC5T2 and get them to boot fine, off of a
SATA drive connected to the NVIDIA SATA controller on the
motherboard. I also have an ARECA 1120 PCI-X RAID SATA controller
plugged into a PCI-X slot on this motherboard. I cannot get access
to the RAID array that is connected to this card, no matter what I
try. Yes, the card is installed properly, and its BIOS is
installed. I have successfully compiled the ARECA driver from ARECA,
and installed the module using insmod.
The problem seems to be because this motherboard has multiple PCI
domains. When I look at the dmesg output, I see that the latest
kernels detect all 3 PCI root buses on the motherboard, but then
there is a message of "PCI Multiple Domains Not Supported" after
their detection. After much research, it appeared that multiple PCI
domains were supported in the latest -mm patch to the stable kernel
from kernel.org, so I tried building a custom kernel with that patch
applied (So I now have kernel 2.6.16-rc4-mm1). I can boot the
kernel, but I get the same problem...multiple PCI domains are not
supported. Does anyone know the status of this? Is it possible to
use a PCI-X RAID card on a motherboard with multiple PCI domains, or
is this just not implemented yet? I have tried all of the other
recommendations that I have heard about, like using the following
kernel parameters (one at a time):
PCI=NOACPI => results in kernel panic
ACPI=OFF => Lots of timeout errors, can't boot
PCI=NOROUTEIRQ => Boots ok, but still can't access ARECA card
I cannot turn off the PCI bus partitioning in the BIOS for this
motherboard, so that is not an option. I have an nVidia GeForce
6600GT PCI Express video card, and that works fine (if that means
anything). If someone could provide me some insight into how to get
the ARECA RAID card accessible to Fedora Core 4 (or 5) I would
appreciate it greatly. If there are any more questions about my
setup, I can answer them...I know I just gave an overview of it here.
Dan Koehler
