I am trying to get my Promise tx4000 ata raid controller working under the 2.6 kernel. Is there a driver for this ide controller in/for the new kernel? I am currently running kernel ver. 2.4.22 with the ft3xx.o (part-binary) driver supplied by Promise. Everything is working fine for the 2.4 kernel. However this driver does not compile with the 2.6 kernel.

In various post I noticed that Promise's ft3xx.o supports the 376/378 series sata controllers as well as the tx4000. Are they related somehow, and if so does the 376/378 module in the new kernel support the tx4000 also?

Thanks in advance.

__________________
Athlon TB 1000MHz
Gigabyte GA-7ZX
VIA KT133 Chipset
GeForce2 MX 100 DDR/200
Promise tx4000 ata/raid controller
LFS 5.0

There is support for promise serial ata chips in Device Drivers->Scsi->low-level drivers->SATA Support->promise. I beleive this supports that card of yours but probably not the raid functions.

I tried building the kernel w/ Device Drivers->Scsi->Low-level Drivers->SATA Support->Sata_promise (both as module and as built-in). As far as I can tell the hard drives don't get detected, or the controller either. This is a snipit of dmesg after a boot when sata_promise is built-in.

The card is a 4 channel PATA/133 controller. Will the SATA Promise drivers work for it?

...
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
VP_IDE: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:07.1
VP_IDE: chipset revision 16
VP_IDE: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
VP_IDE: VIA vt82c686a (rev 22) IDE UDMA66 controller on pci0000:00:07.1
ide0: BM-DMA at 0xffa0-0xffa7, BIOS settings: hdaMA, hdbMA
ide1: BM-DMA at 0xffa8-0xffaf, BIOS settings: hdcio, hddMA
hda: MAXTOR 6L060J3, ATA DISK drive
hdb: Maxtor 91360U4, ATA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hdd: R/RW 4x4x24, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 117266688 sectors (60040 MB) w/1819KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, UDMA(66)
hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 >
hdb: max request size: 128KiB
hdb: 26588016 sectors (13613 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=26377/16/63, UDMA(66)
hdb: hdb1 hdb2 hdb3
libata version 0.81 loaded.
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
input: PC Speaker
serio: i8042 AUX port at 0x60,0x64 irq 12
serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard on isa0060/serio0
...

compughatt, can you explain how you got the ft3xx working in 2.4.22 kernel?
Using mandrake 9.2 here and I can't get the RAID 1 to work.
I get kernel panic all the time.
seems 2.6 is no option because it does not support raid.
I do not want software RAID, because my windoze is on it and it should just use the chip.
Any help very welcome.

Sure. You will probably have to recompile your kernel, but its not that hard. I'm assuming that you do not have neither your boot partition nor your root partition on the raid disks. If you do, than I'm not sure how you would go about booting your system, but it might involve initrd (I've never tried it).

For the ft3xx driver to work under 2.4.22, it is NOT necessary to have any software raid configured into the kernel, NOR do you need any of the other Promise modules. You should be able to use your old configuration and only modify the options that are necessary. If not already configured, you need to configure your kernel for SCSI support and SCSI disk_support, either as modules or built into the kernel. After you have configured your new kernel, build it, copy the kernel image to your boot directory, and install its modules. This is my configuration for the SCSI subsystem:

#
# SCSI support
#
CONFIG_SCSI=m
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SD=m
CONFIG_SD_EXTRA_DEVS=40
# CONFIG_CHR_DEV_ST is not set
# CONFIG_CHR_DEV_OSST is not set
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR=m
# CONFIG_BLK_DEV_SR_VENDOR is not set
CONFIG_SR_EXTRA_DEVS=2
CONFIG_CHR_DEV_SG=m
CONFIG_SCSI_DEBUG_QUEUES=y
# CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN is not set
CONFIG_SCSI_CONSTANTS=y
CONFIG_SCSI_LOGGING=y

In order to compile the ft3xx driver, the folder you built your kernel in MUST be /usr/src/linux. If it isn't, I recommend sym-linking it. Now unpack the source version of the ft3xx driver (its the one that says "linux Source Code" and mentions something about experienced people only). You can get it from the promise website. It might take some digging to find it. The other binary versions of the driver won't work for you, so make sure it is the source version. Inside the directory for ft3xx driver, issue a "make clean" command and a "make" command. Copy the new driver ft3xx.o to /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/drivers/scsi/ replacing <kernel version> with the version number of your kernel, in my case 2.4.22.

Now you have to modify your boot scripts. Unfortunately the boot scripts are not standardized across distributions, so there may be some differences. Depending on how Mandrake sets things up, you now need to add the following lines either to your /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit (or a similarly named file) or to a file in /etc/rc.d/init.d/ and then sym-link that file from your /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinitd/ directory. You might also be able to place them in /etc/rc.d/rc.local.

depmod -Aq > /dev/null 2>&1
insmod scsi_mod > /dev/null 2>&1
insmod sd_mod > /dev/null 2>&1
insmod ft3xx > /dev/null 2>&1

The important thing is to execute these command somewhere within your boot scripts prior to mounting the raid partitions.

Lastly, configure your boot loader, either lilo or grub, to use the new kernel instead of the old one. That's it. If everything goes well you should be able to see your partitions and the raid disk in /proc/partitions. You should be able access your raid disk as /dev/sda or another scsi device. It will say in the partitions file. You should also now see a directory named ft3xx under /proc/scsi.

Thanks for your detailded reply!
I already did what you described many times.
The only thing I did not know is about the /etc/rc.d/ .
I modified /etc/modules and /etc/modules.conf .
I do not have a seperate boot disk, so all my stuff is on the Raid 1 config, but I got Mandrake working, because it autoconfigs the pdc-ultra driver, which does not support Raid.
After recompiling I created a initrd, that should boot the rest of the system.
Some trouble I got on:
The ft3xx was loaded before the scsi_mod and sd_mod modules.
The manpages (mkinitrd) say that with the --with option modules can be inserted after scsi loading. I got errors when loading the module though.
Then I got a lot of kernel panics for not being able to find my /.
I also got 1 time the other module still loading.
I tried to load it at installl (the precompiled ft3xx) but no succes either.
(cannot insmod).
I will try your method.

one thing: Do you know when the settings in /etc/rc.d are used ?
I meen: does the kernel read this at very first?
I guess that is the missing link to my kernle panic.

Thanks! I will post if I have succes or not.

/sbin/init is the very first process. It is started directly by the kernel. Init reads its config file /etc/inittab. Then it starts tasks in the sysinit section of /etc/rc.d.

Most of the system startup is in the sysinit section of /etc/rc.d. This is where modules are loaded, disks mounted, raid arrays started, swaps activated, etc. Everything is started in a specific order, either because of the order of commands in a script, or because of the numbering of symlinks in a directory (like I said before each distro is different).

After that, it executes tasks in a specific run-level; run-level 3 for console use, or run-level 5 for x-windows. The run-levels start up everything else x-servers, apache, mysqld etc.

Hope this helps.

Hi compughatt,

Have you had any luck getting your Promise TX4000 to work with Kernel 2.6? I did a Google search and didn't feel encouraged.

Thanks,
--
Rick

No. I gave up on it. Oh well... Instead, I got a regular, vanilla ide controller and am now using software raid. It works great.

Same here, the doctor decided to try gentoo with 2.6.5 kernel. Works fine. Even gots 4 port support now for the sil3114 chip.
Some good howto's for software raid i used and combined and voilá.
Seems those bitch-asses are a little late with the on-chip bios support. Really think that is shame.

However it works!

Thanks all for you contribution!