Langdon Stevenson wrote:
Daniel Jabbour wrote:
Hi,
I’ve recently acquired some Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers. I loaded
Fedora Core 6 on them fine, did a yum update and much to my surprise
the box kernel panics on boot. I haven’t loaded anything else on the
box, other than a stock OS.
I did some investigation and determined the issue only occurs with the
latest (2.6.22.1-32) kernel. It did not occur with 2.6.20 or 2.6.18.
It seems that the drivers for the Perc 5i controller (megaraid_sas) is
seeing through the BIOS of the controller and showing all 6 disks
rather than one logical volume. Since the volume is actually RAID 10,
it cannot mount the root filesystem.
This problem seem very similar to one detailed in an older kernel on
the Ubuntu bug tracker:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/55138
I also noticed that the bug has a patch applied in Ubuntu:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/57265
Is this issue known in the Fedora world? What do you suggest I do to
resolve it? Is this the appropriate list for this, or is there
another one that would be more pertinent? Why would the Ubuntu patch
not be also applied to the FC6 kernel, wouldn’t it have patched the
kernel.org kernel and shouldn’t it have made its way over to Fedora?
Or, could this be a new issue? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks,
Hi Daniel
I have just gone through the same issue with a Dell PowerEdge 2300 with
a Perc2/SC controller. F7 uses an updated version of the Megaraid
controller that nolonger supports my card. Yours may have a similar
issue. There are instructions on the net to help you revert to an older
version of the Megaraid controller. This is the best resource I can
find for switching the driver:
http://www.tuxyturvy.com/blog/index.php?/archives/4-Installing-RHEL4-on-Systems-with-Legacy-Megaraid-Drivers.html
Sadly it doesn't help me as I can't even get the installer working (as I
am limited to an HTTP or FTP install, which seems to be broken on F7
(unless anyone can point out how to do it? The installer always fails
to download stage2.img)
Hope this might help you with your server. It is frustrating that
support for the older hardware is being dropped. This equipment is
perfect for small/home offices. It would be great if there was an easy
method of specifying the driver that you want to use during. I have
read that one driver can't support all of these old Perc cards, so the
question is: why not supply both drivers?
My solution has been to install Debian on my Dell. Apparently it has
the older megaraid driver in the installer and everything works fine. I
am sad to have to dump Fedora on this machine, but couldn't justify days
of hassle to get it running.
Hi Daniel
An update that may help you. I managed to get an install of F7 on my
Dell PowerEdge 2300 this evenin. Because this is with a Perc2/SC card
it may not work for you, however I thought it worth posting. This is
what I did:
1. Boot up a Fedora installer to the install selection window
2. Add option: linux noprobe to init string (this stops the installer
trying to detect hard drives)
3. Work through installer until prompted to choose a driver
4. Choose the plain megaraid driver
5. The install should now proceed as per usual with you hard drive detected
6. When the system reboots enter the Perc card's utility (Ctrl-M for a
Perc2)
7. Check that it is set for MASS STORAGE rather than I2O by going to:
Objects > Adapter
8. Reboot
That should be it. My system went through some wierdness working
through all of the disks the first couple of times it booted and giving
lots of ominous messages, but eventually it booted.
I am now fighting a problem with X freezing when I start it, but that is
another story.
Hope this might be helpful to you.
Regards,
Langdon
