The unreasonable expensive of attaching more hard drives to computers
 

Sorry, maybe a bad title, but I just bought a Promise FastTrak SX8300 and it completely doesn't work on Linux (contrary to what the support page on promise leads one to believe). As far as I can tell, the last time Promise's drivers compiled on Linux 2.6 was many releases ago (and no one I spoke with at their tech support even knew the Linux basics). So, unless anyone has an idea of how to get it to work - I'm going to look for a different SATA controller. The SATA Controller on my $400 opteron motherboard died - and it is just out of warranty. Many motherboards can be had fairly cheap now - basically for the same price as a PCI-32/64-bit SATA controller with the same number of ports, itself (and the majority of us have no need for ultra expensive hardware RAID when software on Linux does many things better). There is huge shortage of non-raid SATA controllers, however (and as we know only a subset of any given uncommon hardware is supported by Linux). Unless I have overlooked something, do any of you know of non-raid SATA controllers that are supported by Linux and have a reasonable number of ports (6-12)? All ideas are welcome, thanks.

So exactly what happened when you downloaded the "partial driver source" on their web site and tried to get it to work with your kernel?

I had various compiler errors. On 64bit Arch Linux, I tried to troubleshoot the wrong cpu type errors for a while, but modifying their make file just created what seemed to be more complex problems. I also read somewhere that that partial driver source does not compile on Linux kernels newer than 2.6.9, though I have no way of verifying that. On 32bit Arch Linux I had errors too:
Let me know if you'd like me to post the "partial driver source" make file so you all don't have to download it. I'm very surprised at that lack of evidence that anyone has gotten this hardware to work on Linux in the last couple of years.

A typo in the Makefile ? ?

Should be :
/usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h

Thanks - I corrected that error, but I get one just as quickly back:


I need to find out if anyone anywhere has gotten this hardware to work on Linux within the last couple of years.

Here is the makefile so you don't have to download the partial source yourself from promise: http://codepad.org/z65tRSC5

edit: got some different gcc deps; more errors: http://codepad.org/sLkcLFLo

This one works perfectly. I'm pretty sure I never installed any drivers---or did anything. It "just worked".

Yeah TX4 is supported in the kernel. The SX series, not so much. Thanks, but I need more ports than that and PCI-X support.

# 5
GLIBCXX_3.4.11 → translate : (g)lib (std)c++_"3.4.11"
is a gcc version 4.3 created object in libstdc++, I think.

Do not expect the code to work, unless you fix it
to be used with your default compiler.
.....

Yeah I tried with 4.4, 4.3, 3.4, and a lot of other stuff. I've basically given up, bitten the bullet, and found a decently supported card for $100. I'd still like to see a cheaper solution to software RAID setups. Thanks anyway guys.

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Okay, but I'm not sure what that has to do with this.

Looks like an ad, look at the sig

sandy;
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