1. Does anyone know if the mentioned have good support for SATA-RAID/linux.. i will be installing fedora core 2, dling it right now as i speak.

2. i see there are sata drivers for rh7,8,9 in asus driver dl section.. are they actually required?

3. if they arent really required, are the drivers built into kernel already?


i must do mirror-raid without issues, i need advise please.

and which board is better? a7n8x or a7n8x-e deluxe?

What's the SATA raid card? Some have in-kernel drivers, some have no drivers, some have proprietary drivers that only work with certain distros/kernels.

Cheers,

Finegan

Silicon Image Serial ATA driver for RedHat 7.3/8.0/9.0 , SuSE 8.0/8.1 and UnitedLinux 1.0 driver.

Silicon Image Sil 3112A RAID Controller:
-2 x Serial ATA
-RAID 0, RAID1


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anyway uhm.. how do i use these drivers? i know in winxp, i press f6 during cdsetup.. how about for nix?

I don't know about Fedora but it works well with Gentoo. You should know that the sil3112 controller is not a "true" RAID controller - it actually does software RAID on-chip. The Medley RAID setup can be accessed using Thomas Horsten's Medley driver or by using the RAID-detect tool. David Dollar has some good info too.

This above is all for using the controller using it as quasi-hardware RAID. Using the drives as regular drives or using LVM (Linux software RAID) works fine. The kernel has two different drivers for the sil3112 controller - the regular EIDE/ATA driver and the libata driver. Both work well with current kernels (2.6.5, 2.6.6) and your box will most likely run fine "out of the box" with a new distribution.

However, the nforce2 chipset has some issues you may want to know of: Booting the kernel with "acpi=off" and "nolapic" does wonder for the stability of the chipset.


Håkan

very very useful info, thanks a lot man!

ive been trying to find out what all that means
.. been reading http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/errata.php3

just for my understanding..

why turn off acpi? why noapic / nolapic

Because the nforce2 chipset has a bug that causes nforce2-based motherboard to freeze solid (requiring a hard reboot) unless you do it. I was under the impression you had one of those motherboards, but if you don't forget what I said.

I compiled my latest kernel without APIC support since it was never going to be used on my NF7-Sr2 anyway.


Håkan

what is acpi function in linux anyway?
and what about apic?

do they play a role in linux at all? mind explaining their roles technically if there are any.. and how they conflict with nf2 and if its strictly nf2 only