Slack-current 2.6.12.3 recompile
 

Currently I have a PIII-Xeon dual processor system with an Adaptec 7892 scsi controller. Originally, I loaded Slack-10.1 with the adaptec.s kernel and then recompiled it to include HIGHMEM and SMP. It works just fine using the 2.4.29 kernel as I haven't recompiled with the 2.4.31 kernel in -current, yet.

My issue is, I'm wanting to upgrade to the 2.6.12.3 kernel in the /testing branch. I installed the headers, and the source, since I know that the generic kernel and modules won't work 'out of the box'. I went into the source tree, and ran 'make menuconfig' enabled SMP and turned off Raid (I actually have a raid system, but stupidly, did not enable it during installation (as I mentioned, I ran with adaptec.s instead of raid.s for who knows what reason). I compiled the kernel and installed the config, system.map, kernel image and edited lilo.conf and ran 'lilo'. Following that, I rebooted trying to use the kernel, with a pretty good guess it wouldn't load without a ramdisk/initrd image. It didn't... it wouldn't find the scsi device and halted when attempted to locate the root device.

As per the README.initrd in the /testing tree, I rebooted back into 2.4.29, then ran mkinitrd. I specified 'aacraid' and 'aic7xxx' since I have noticed they're called in my 2.4.29 bootup, and called the 'jbd' and 'ext3' modules since my root partition uses ext3. The following was the first mkinitrd I ran in the /boot dir:

mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.12.3js -m aacraid:aic7xxx:jbd:ext3 -f ext3 -r /dev/sda2

As usual, I added the 'initrd = /boot/initrd.gz' line to lilo.conf, and reran lilo. Then rebooted. Now it found the scsi controller, but made reference to unknown symbols, specifically (forgive me, it never saved to dmesg after rebooting into 2.4.29, nor any logs) mentioning 'transport' and 'spi'. Looking in the /lib/modules/2.6.12.3js/kernel/drivers/scsi dir, I noticed the scsi_transport_spi, scsi_transport_fc, and scsi_transport_iscsi modules. I tried loading them into the mkinitrd statements prior to the aacraid module, and edited everything, reran lilo, and rebooted. Again, it came up with unknown symbols and then it's attempt to load the other scsi modules. I started off using the stock .config file with Slack's kernel-source install.

The modules are in the /boot/initrd-tree/ directory, in /lib/modules/2.6.12.3js/ as mentioned in the startup screen. My main question here is... Am I missing additional modules, or am I missing something during configuration, or compilation in order to get the adaptec SCSI adapter to work?

Nevermind ;) One thing I noticed with the 2.4.29 kernel was the inclusion of an Adaptec I2O Raid module. I added the 'dpt_12o' module to the mkinitrd command, and now it loads, albeit with some errors, but I can't see those errors interfering with the operation of the system thus far.