Hi,

first of all, sorry, if this has been asked before. I looked through this forum, but couldn't fine quite what I need.

My problem is this:
Slackware 10.0 has been running perfectly well with the bare.i kernel on one of my machines. Now I added a SCSI controller in order to connect a SCSI tape streamer and a SCSI scanner to it. To this end I have to replace the bare.i kernel with scsi2.s (which I hope to be the right choice for a Tekram DC395U SCSI adapter...).

What is the best way to switch the kernel?

There seem to be no Slackware packages with SCSI kernel binaries. So I thought I'd create a new bootdisk and install the new kernel from that using pkgtool. However, the bootdisk image created by makedisk is too large --- it doesn't fit on a standard HD floppy disk formatted for standard capacity (1.44MB). So this plan didn't work.

What options do I have, now, and which one is the best?

Thanks again!

gargamel

Are you sure that bare.i kernel does not support your SCSI controler ?

You mean makebootdisk. makebootdisk should format the floppy first to 1680k. You can open the script in a text editor and change the line for 1440k though. But this floppy will still not boot like a slackware installation floppy(it will not mount a floppy root file system).
Isn't there a scsi2 BOOTDISK? And do you really need an install bootdisk?
To change the kernel just copy the bzImage, config and system.map into /boot. The best thing is to name them with the same, unique suffix: kernel: vmlinuz-customname; system.map: system.map-customname; config: config-customname
The system is smart and can locate the correct fiel to match the kernel and several kernels can all reside in the same dir.
then add the entry to lilo.conf and run lilo -v -t and if no errors then lilo
If you really want to make a custom installation bootdisk that works just like a slack bootdisk then you need to go into the /bootdisks dir and look at the script makedisk. You can't just run it as it is meant to run inside of make_all_bootdisks. But it has the commands there that you need to carry out to get a custom install floppy. You can use message.txt and syslinux.cfg from a standard Slack bootdisk and you can build it with any kernel from /kernels dir or self-compiled as long as it isn't over... er can't remember the figure, 1204k maybe. Anyway the rdev commands are what will make your kernel do what you want.

None of my SCSI devices is seen, it seems --- no sign of them in /var/log/messages or dmesg. There are also no generic SCSI support modules and no supporting devices.

modprobe sg
and lsmod

tell me that the desired module could not be found. Interestingly that's only true for kernel 2.4.26. I checked it also with 2.6.7, and there I see an sg module. However, no SCSI device, either:

cat /proc/scsi/scsi

returns nothing.

From that I conclude that bare.i doesn't support SCSI, apart from ide-scsi.
But I may be wrong. Do I miss something obvious?

gargamel

Yes I would think so (kernel does not support SCSI). But to make boot disk from other kernels, aren't there instructions to how to do it in /kernels subdirectories in the install CDs ?

[edit]
This link may help : http://www.slackware.com/faq/do_faq....installation#4

First of all, thanks for your reply.

Hmmm. Right now I'm not on Slack, so I can't verify it, but I thought the instructions (README file or something) were talking of makedisk... But it's quite possible that I misunderstood something.

OUCH. You are, of course, right, there is, in fact, such a boot disk... I should avoid working so long....

Unsure, here. pkgtool has a function "install kernel from boot disk", which I thought I could use. In order to be able to so I thought I'd create the boot disk, first. Of course, I had other ideas, first, but see below...

I had this idea, in fact, but this way I would bypass the package management database of my system, which I would like to avoid, if possible. But if I don't find a way that helps to do it in more "official" manner, this method would certainly be an option.

The script worked, in prinicipal, but it terminated with an error message, that the data would not fit on the boot disk --- I had no System.map on the boot disk created.

Any additional comments or ideas are much appreciated!

gargamel

There are instructions telling to use ./makedisk. Which I did, giving me the mentioned result: Image created too big to fit on a floppy.

gargamel

Ok, I have the bootdisk. I copied vmlinuz from it to /boot (renamed it to vmlinuz-scsi-2426), added a section in /etc/lilo.conf for it, issued lilo and rebooted. Unfortunately... no effect. Still no SCSI devices detected.

I guess, the right driver is missing. Tekram DC395 is not listed in the description of any boot disk. That probably means that I have to compile my own kernel --- which I wanted to avoid as means that I'll have to to it over and over again, whenever a security patch is to be applied...

Thanks for your suggestions and comments, so far. Further thoughts and ideas welcome!

gargamel

Wait...there's 3 SCSI kernels I think. Try the other two.

Yes, thanks. It seems that none of them has support for my SCSI adapter (Tekram DC395U). To my surprise this popular controller is not supported in the standard Linux kernel.

However, I found a driver for Slackware 9.0 and a kernel source tree patch, but right now I don't have the time to check them out. BTW, the driver maintenance is sponsored by SuSE, my other favourite distro --- which explains why I have never had no problems on SuSE with that controller. So this is the one situation when vendor patches aren't a bad thing...

Thanks!

gargamel

SOLVED: Kernel 2.6.7 supports my SCSI controller by default. 8-)
All I have to do is activate the driver module (modprobe) and the SCSI generic module (sg).

(1) Uncomment the line
#/sbin/modprobe sg

(2) Add
/sbin/modprobe dc395x

Thanks for your patience!

gargamel