Great news my friends, especially ones with SuSE 9.1/9.2.
I've managed to compile successfully the driver as a module and now SuSE install can see the hard drives on the RAID controller.
Here's what I did:
0. You have to use another working Linux machine, with the same version of running kernel as used in the installation. For example, SuSE 9.2 Professional has kernel 2.6.8-24, so you must compile the source inside a kernel 2.6.8-24 tree, not an earlier one, not a later one as kernel modules are binary incompatible across versions (I do hope that the kernel gurus will come up with some solution to this problem).
1. Go to
www.ite.com.tw and from the Software download section, download the driver for IT8212F (it's a new one). It contains binaries (not useful to kernels >2.4) but we'll compile it from source.
2. Unpack the file and grab the contents of src/2.6.x directory.
3. CD to /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi
4. mv Makefile Makefile.previous
5. Copy iteraid.c, iteraid.h and Makefile from the driver source directory (2.6.x) to /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi
6. Edit the Makefile file inside /usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi. Note the first line which refers to your linux kernel source directory (it says "linux-2.6.1", change it to the name of your kernel directory. For SuSE 9.2 this is "linux-2.6.8-24").
7. Type "make" (without the quotes). The source should compile - with some warnings regarding obsolete files and some other stuff - and in the end the files "iteraid.ko" and "iteraid.o" will be built. Copy them to a vfat floppy disk
Now, go to the machine you want to install SuSE and has the IT8212 controler. Before doing anything, enter the ITE8212 BIOS (Ctrl-G) and set-up your RAID arrays accordingly. For example, on my system I have a 120Gb hard disk (with windows) and two more disks (total 10Gb) which I set up as a spanned array (6GB + 4GB = 10GB).
1. Boot the system from the SuSE DVD-ROM.
2. When the graphical user interface appears (not the lilo one, but the actual installation interface), press ALT-F2 in order to get to the command prompt.
3. Insert the disk with the compiled iteraid.ko files
4. mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt
5. cd /mnt
6. insmod iteraid.ko
after a brief delay, the command prompt will re-appear and if there are no messages, the driver was loaded successfully
7. cd /
8. Press ALT-F7 to return to the graphical interface (do not remove the floppy disk until installation is over) and SuSE install should recognize the disks in the ITE 8212 as SCSI disks.
Now, if only I could find some info on how to make a driver disk out of these, then I could install the driver on my new system without having to recompile the driver in the kernel. Any ideas?
Greetings from Greece.