Hello,

Has anyone had any luck installing Slackware64 with an integrated DotHill SATA RAID controller? I am replacing my 10 year PII 400 home server running Slackware 12.1 with a new machine. I purchased Chenbro server chassis with 4 bay hot swap HDD cage/SATA II backplane attached to Tyan S8005GM2NR-LE motherboard/AMD Phenom II X4 925 Deneb 2.8GHz AM3 processor. The onboard RAID is an AMD SP5100 DotHill SATA RAID. I have the SATA set to RAID in the BIOS and built a RAID 10 array however Slackware64 is not seeing the RAID but rather the 4 individual drives. I also tried changing the SATA BIOS setting to AHCI and Native IDE but Slackware64 still sees4 individual drives.

I checked Tyan's site for a Linux driver but no such luck. Since I was frustrated I pulled down the latest live CDs of Fedora, SUSE and CentOS but the other distributions behave the same way Slackware64 does.

I am planning on creating a boot partition and the remaining space will be assigned as a LVM partition on the RAID. I am trying to stay away from building the RAID in the OS. Does anyone have any ideas that I can try aside from purchasing a PCI RAID controller?

Thanks,

-Brian

the on board RAID is probably fake RAID,
so its basically worthless.
linux's software RAID is pretty good on the other hand, why wont you use that instead?

There are basically three ways to support fake hardware RAID on Linux.

• dmraid
• mdadm
• A proprietary driver from the manufacturer

The "dmraid" program can configure your device mapper driver in Linux to access the drives. I have not been able to get "dmraid" to work with 64-bit Slackware although it looks possible. The other problem with "dmraid" is that it has not been updated in a while and will probably stop being usable at some point in the future.

The "mdadm" program supports only the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (IMSM) RAID format (metadata). Also, the version in Slackware 13.1 does not support even the Intel RAID. You will have to update "mdadm" to support any fake hardware RAID. It's possible that your RAID controller and others may be supported in future changes to "mdadm". You might want to suggest that to the authors of "mdadm" as it seems to be maintained and updated more than "dmraid".

Some manufacturers have proprietary Linux drivers for their controllers that you can download from their site. Many of those are limited to specific versions of Linux and specific distros. I haven't had too much luck finding something that works for me but it's always good to check.

In order to use "dmraid" you have to create a custom "initrd" image and include the required files. A small change to the "init" script for the "initrd" is required. I have this working for 32-bit Slackware 13.1. I have used this approach (with variations) for Slackware 10 through 13.1 (32-bit) and also a Promise RAID controller or Intel RAID controller.

This recent thread of mine has all the files required to create the "initrd". Make sure to include the "-u" option for "mkinitrd" as indicated by my last post for the thread.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...initrd-843125/

If you decide to try this, preparation is important. You will need "dmraid" and the required library files as well as the scripts to create the "initrd" image. It helps to have a floppy or thumb drive where you can put the files for access during installation. I usually install Slackware to a non-raid drive and then test everything before I try to boot from RAID. Then I usually copy the Slackware files to the RAID array rather than installing directly to RAID.

To use the normal Slackware "setup" script I had to edit the script. I can find the information if you need that. I posted it a few times for other people. Basically the command to detect partitions does not work with fake RAID and I had to replace it with a different command. The rest of "setup" worked fine.

If you want copies of the files for Slackware 13.1 32-bit I will be happy to post them. I do suggest that you get 32-bit Slackware to work before you attempt 64-bit.

To boot 64-bit you will need a 64-bit version of "dmraid" and the required libraries. It may be possible to use 32-bit "dmraid" on Slackware 64-bit with additional 32-bit support libraries. I've never tried that. It may also be possible to build or obtain "dmraid" for a 64-bit kernel.

Read the documentation for "dmraid" before you do anything, to make sure that it claims to support your RAID controller. Also, try to avoid using logical drives in an extended partition. The "dmraid" program has trouble with that if there are empty spaces between the logical partitions or at the beginning of the extended partition. I've had to adjust logical partition sizes or re-create partitions to avoid that problem. It works better if you create all the Linux partitions in Linux. I usually put the swap file first in the extended partition since I can easily delete and re-create that to adjust for gaps.

BE CAREFUL! Back up your partitions and files before you try to access fake RAID from Linux. I have never wiped a disk but other people have due to bugs or mistakes. It's always best to test using a normal disk to install Linux and limit RAID access to read-only until you have some confidence in the configuration. Plan to spend some time on this because every fake RAID installation has different issues or problems.

Thanks for the good info. I hope to get a chance to look at the machine this week. If not this week, next week for sure. I've been scouring Tyan's ftp site and came across a manual for the RAID. The manual has directions for Red Hat and SUSE so I think there has to be a way to make it work in Slackware. I'll probably end up going with mdadm unless I can get the driver to work.

-Brian

From what I can determine, the DotHill RAID is fake hardware RAID. The "dmraid" utility supports these RAID metadata formats.

asr : Adaptec HostRAID ASR (0,1,10)
ddf1 : SNIA DDF1 (0,1,4,5,linear)
hpt37x : Highpoint HPT37X (S,0,1,10,01)
hpt45x : Highpoint HPT45X (S,0,1,10)
isw : Intel Software RAID (0,1)
jmicron : JMicron ATARAID (S,0,1)
lsi : LSI Logic MegaRAID (0,1,10)
nvidia : NVidia RAID (S,0,1,10,5)
pdc : Promise FastTrack (S,0,1,10)
sil : Silicon Image(tm) Medley(tm) (0,1,10)
via : VIA Software RAID (S,0,1,10)
dos : DOS partitions on SW RAIDs

As you can see it does not specifically mention DotHill RAID. It is possible that one of the listed manufacturers such as "jmicron" may actually use the DotHill RAID software and metadata format.

The proprietary software from the DotHill web site only claims to support Suse and Red Hat Linux. You may still be able to use the driver software on a 32-bit version of Slackware with some manual steps to build and install the software. Send an E-Mail to DotHill support and they may be able to tell you what is required or even send you software source files to build the driver. I suspect that the software only supports Linux kernel version 2.4 because it only mentions those two distros.

It may be simpler and still affordable for you to buy a different plug-in RAID controller card that is better supported with Linux drivers, "mdadm" or "dmraid". I've had to do that with other Linux hardware such as my dial-up modem for my laptop. By spending $50 for a good USB modem "dongle" I was able to easily get it working on Linux. Since I only have one phone line I only really need one modem "dongle" and plug it into any computer where I want dial-up. Using a plug-in RAID card may also allow you to make a few computers identical and able to read each other's RAID drives for data recovery. You can certainly buy a spare RAID card even if you don't plan to have two computers using RAID.

If you do use on-board RAID, the Intel Matrix Array Storage Manager (IMSM) for the ICH (I/O Connection Hub) chipsets is the best supported "fake hardware" RAID format at the moment. The second best is any format supported by "dmraid".