Dell PERC2/SC RAID known supported distro?

slacker9876 · 10-16-2006, 05:04 PM

I am looking for a little first hand information here folks. I have a Dell PowerEdge 2300 server with a lil over 100GB capacity. The linux 2.6.x kernels no longer support the Dell PERC2/SC RAID Contorllers made by AMI. Since I do not have an option here ... short of spending $750 for a newer PERC ... I was hoping that someone may have a disto running on this hardware and could point me in the direction of that distro. I am happy to run whatever works.

MensaWater · 02-20-2007, 02:08 PM

Late but here goes.

The Dell 6300 we have also has the PERC 2/SC - It runs RH 7.3.

If it's really a 2.4 vs 2.6 kernel thing then FC 3 likely would work because it still had the 2.4 kernel and at least is several versions newer than 7.3.

Did you by any chance get a 2.6 kernel working? I was under the impression one could load in drivers on the fly.

I'm in the middle of looking for a way to update drivers for Fedora Core 6 (FC6) which also has the 2.6 kernel.

MensaWater · 02-21-2007, 10:34 AM

I ended up putting in a PERC 4/DC card we had available. FC6 recognized that without a problem.

This morning I saw a response on my LUG's mail list suggesting the PERC 2/SC could be made to work in the 2.6 kernel. I didn't do anything with this as I'd already moved on with the other card but figured I'd post it here for the next person that stumbles across this thread:

Quote:

There is a 2.6 driver for those old megaraid cards. It is considered a "legacy" card, and you need the CONFIG_MEGARAID_LEGACY option set to Y or M in your kernel to use it.

I'm not familiar with FC, but on openSuSE 10.20, they currently deliver these modules:
/lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/kernel/drivers/scsi/megaraid.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/kernel/drivers/scsi/megaraid/megaraid_mm.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/kernel/drivers/scsi/megaraid/megaraid_sas.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/kernel/drivers/scsi/megaraid/megaraid_mbox.ko

# modinfo /lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/kernel/drivers/scsi/megaraid.ko
filename: /lib/modules/2.6.18.2-34-default/kernel/drivers/scsi/megaraid.ko
author: sju@lsil.com
description: LSI Logic MegaRAID legacy driver

P.S. Make sure you know which PERC 2 you have - From some of the posts I've seen on the 6300 in my search it appears there was an Adaptec PERC 2 and the solution for that may be different than the one for the LSI PERC 2/SC.

jdfields · 07-17-2010, 05:10 PM

This all seems to be very misleading.
Under Fedora 8, I've installed PERC 2/SC (aka AMI 466)
without any problems on 3 machines.
Kernel 2.6.27.8-57 (last kernel update for F8)

jefro · 07-18-2010, 06:02 PM

See dell site for drivers for linux.

MensaWater · 07-26-2010, 01:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jdfields

This all seems to be very misleading.
Under Fedora 8, I've installed PERC 2/SC (aka AMI 466)
without any problems on 3 machines.
Kernel 2.6.27.8-57 (last kernel update for F8)

Replying to 4 year old threads isn't helpful unless you have a fix not already posted. Fedora 8 almost certainly does things differently than the Fedora Core 6 did. They may have consolidate drivers or fixed whatever was selecting the drivers in the later release.

There's nothing misleading about what I posted for FC6 as I saw it at the time (2007).

MensaWater · 07-26-2010, 02:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jefro

See dell site for drives for linux.

Dell site isn't going to be very helpful on really old things like this. The issue at the time was that Fedora couldn't be loaded - Back then Dell was barely talking about RHEL and not at all about Fedora. Nowadays while they do have things to load on a running system I don't know that they have anything that one could use to create an install disk. However, as I noted back in 2007 the answer was to choose the correct megaraid driver during the install as the one it defaulted to was for newer PERC cards.