Considering a Gigabyte GA-K8NSPro - RAID issues
 

Hi, I'm thinking about upgrading my motherboard and CPU and decided to go for an Athlon64 and Gigabyte are a favourite of mine, however, they have changed RAID controllers from promise (which I know about and have working flawlessly as standard IDE ATA channels) to some company called ITE. Doing a search in different forums, it's easy to see that quite a few people have had struggles with ITE controllers.

One problem is that I'm not exactly sure what chipset the RAID controller is, the gigabyte website just says "GigaRAID ATA 133" under the RAID section, it doesn't mention the ITE chipset. I know that ITE released drivers for some chipset... just wondering if anyone has any experience with them at all.... have them working fine and how I would go about getting them to work.

I'm running the 2.6.8 kernel in Gentoo.

Any info appreciated. :)


[edit]
Also, does anyone know how if nforce3 chipsets are supported and how nicely they run?

The GA-K8NS Pro uses the IT8212 chip for its GigaRIAD. Although ITE has released drivers for this chip you have to be really lucky to get it to work under linux. I have gotten these drivers to work with SuSE 9.0 (kernel 2.4.x) but so far it only halfway works with with SuSE 9.1 (kernel 2.6.x). If you plan on booting to a raid partition I do not recommend using any ITE chip.

Wow thanks for the reply. I forgot about this. I bought the hardware anyway and found it pretty simple to get the drivers working.

This guide lays down some of the basics:

http://www.passys.nl/tips/ite_kernel_image_compile.txt

In short, you should copy the contents of the drivers/scsi/ dir somewhere, throw the ITE files in with them and compile. Then transfer the files back to the real kernel drivers dir.

Thanks all the same. :)

I did something similar to your solution and got the module to compile. But the problem I am having is it will not boot with the module if / is on the raid array. But it will work if I boot to the suse install cd, load the module, and then boot to the raid array. I am going to try to compile it in the kernel and see if that works.

Justus

breakerfall i've got a question. Did you re-install Linux on a drive, connected to the ITE RAID or did you just install the raid support for a disk used as a storage place?

I used the disks on RAID only for storage (using ReiserFS).

pitty,

i'm trying to make it rock'n'roll as a bootable disk for FC3. It didn't work yet...

I shouldn't imagine it would be so difficult, as long as you have the modules loading at boot. Granted, you would probably need a custom made boot disk of some kind.